$220,764 Stablecoin Swap Ends in Disaster for DeFi Trader

Crypto News Exploits

Written by Aaron S.,

Editor-In-Chief

Last Updated: March 13, 2025

Key Takeaways

A crypto trader lost over $215,000 in a sandwich attack while swapping stablecoins on Uniswap v3;
The attacker manipulated liquidity, front-ran the trade, and sent $200K to an Ethereum block builder;
Uniswap’s official front end has MEV protection, but the exploited trades didn’t go through it.

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$220,764 Stablecoin Swap Ends in Disaster for DeFi Trader

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On March 12, a crypto trader lost over $215,000 in a sandwich attack while swapping stablecoins.

Michael Nadeau, The DeFi Report founder, reported in a post on X that the trader attempted to exchange $220,764 in USD Coin USDC $1.00 but ended up with just $5,271 in Tether USDT $1.00 after a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot exploited the transaction.

The bot took advantage of the Uniswap v3 $186.77M USDC-USDT liquidity pool by briefly pulling out the USDC before the trade was executed, only to restore it immediately after.

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According to Nadeau, the attacker sent $200,000 to an Ethereum ETH $3,045.67 block builder, "bob-the-builder.eth", while keeping $8,000 in profit.

Initially, Nadeau criticized Uniswap, suggesting the platform’s design allowed these attacks to happen. However, after discussions with Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams and other community members, he acknowledged that the exploited transactions did not originate from Uniswap’s official front end.

A blockchain expert known as @TheDEFIac on X pointed out that the same trader, or someone using multiple wallets in a similar way, had been caught in at least six sandwich attacks. All these transactions followed the same route—funds borrowed from Aave AAVE $187.72 were moved to Uniswap before being drained by MEV bots.

Two of these incidents took place on the same day, with different wallets losing $138,838 and $128,003 in separate swaps. Both transactions happened within minutes of each other and followed the same pattern as the larger $220,764 loss.

Recently, Kaspersky reported that cybercriminals used a crypto-mining malware called SilentCryptoMiner to target YouTube creators. How? Read the full story.