A trader who swapped $2.01 million worth of Ether on a decentralized exchange was left with just $14,500 worth of tokens after a router routed the order through a low-liquidity pool, allowing the Ethereum block builder to make huge profits from an arbitrage trade on the same block.

According to GoPlus Security, the trader exchanged 1,126.44 Ether (ETH) tokens but only received 5,776 Lighter (LIT) tokens in a “textbook case of same-block reverse extraction.”

“This was a true, highly unsustainable backrunner arbitrage, not a classic sandwich attack,” GoPlus Security said. The biggest beneficiary was Titan Builder, which pocketed $1.8 million from a transaction that took place at 1:59 UTC on Monday.

Source: Lookonchain

The incident is a reminder of the risks posed by maximum extraction value (MEV) bots and liquidity routers, as well as hackers and fraudsters that continue to be rampant in the crypto industry.

Don’t sign DEX trades blindly, says trader

To reduce the risk of such incidents, cryptocurrency trader Ruslan Khairullin he said Traders should read the trade route before signing the trade.

“This is what happens when you click confirmation faster than you read the route. A painful lesson to see in real time.”

Source: Łukasz Cannon

How the victim lost $2 million to a bot

The victim’s swap funneled approximately 1,117 Ether into the low-liquidity AVAIL/WETH pool on Uniswap v3, resulting in the trade being executed at a price approximately 120 times higher than the price at which AVAIL could later be sold, GoPlus Security claims.

After the trader received nearly 6.67 million AVAIL tokens at an inflated price, the affected router 0x sold a diminutive amount of outside-sourced AVAIL to the same pool to mine approximately 1,072 WETH before paying out $1,018 ETH worth $1.8 million to Titan as a builder reward.

AVAIL was then converted into $14,200 worth of LIT tokens, representing a 99.3% loss.

Related: The “All DeFi Dangerous” claim sparks debate over AI security after a wave of hacking attacks in April

Cointelegraph contacted Tytan but did not receive an immediate response.

Titan earned $112.6 million this year from block construction services, data from DefiLlama shows.

Titan’s biggest day this year came in March, when the company reaped approximately $34 million in arbitrage profits from the MEV bot incident in the CoW protocol.

Monthly change in Tytan’s revenue from February 2025 Source: DefiLlama

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