A Uniswap User Lost $700,000 to an MEV Bot — But it Only Made $260

A Uniswap V3 user who appears to have misidentified one token for another when forming a liquidity pool lost approximately $700,000 in 12 seconds to a MEV-related transaction. 

When the user added $1.56 million worth of wrapped BTC to the liquidity pool, it appears that they confused the value of the Curve DAO token (CRV) for USD. However, the user received 1.56 million CRV in return, which was only worth about $850,000 at the time.

Read Also: Ethereum Whale Withdraws 8,698 ETH From Binance, Here’s Reason

MEV bots raced in to take advantage of the arbitrage, albeit the most successful only made only $260 after paying a $527,000 bribe to validators to ‘frontrun’ other bots and get its transaction through first, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham. “Tough luck,” Arkham wrote in his post. 

MEV Bots instantly rushed the pool to swap CRV for valuable WBTC – with the first bot making off with $1.36M in WBTC for only $730K in CRV.

But the bot only netted ~$260, paying $527K of ETH to the validator just to make this transaction.

Tough luck! pic.twitter.com/3JbVwhwYoj

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) November 4, 2023

Transaction errors, often known as “fat finger” errors, are not uncommon in crypto. Last month, a user exchanged nearly $130,000 in one stablecoin, USDR, for $0 in another stablecoin, USDC.