A Fat-Fingered Uniswap V3 Order Cost One LP $1.3M — and 98% Went to a Validator

A pricing mistake by a Uniswap V3 liquidity provider cost roughly $1.3 million on Tuesday, after an MEV bot captured the resulting arbitrage — then handed 98% of its take straight to the validator who included the block.

The affected wallet, aavebank.eth, has previously been flagged for costly liquidity moves, despite having no apparent connection to the Aave lending protocol beyond the shared name.

Credit: PeckShield

01What happened

aavebank.eth added 2 million USDT of liquidity to the UNI-USDT pair at a price point far outside the current range, then burned the LP position just two minutes later — withdrawing only about 99,000 UNI, worth roughly $730,000. The mismatch let MEV bot 0xfde0d1 capture the difference: nearly $1.3 million in excess USDT.

Out-of-range positions on Uniswap V3 can function like limit orders, and one observer noted that aavebank.eth had used this pattern before — typically setting up a future UNI purchase with $2 million USDT placed outside the active range. This time, the range was set incorrectly, effectively offering to buy $730,000 worth of UNI for $2 million in USDT. The wallet's ENS name notwithstanding, there is no indication it belongs to anyone affiliated with Aave. Similar mistakes are not limited to unsophisticated actors — even experienced DeFi teams have made comparable errors.

02Where the profit went

Rather than keep the gain, the bot paid out the bulk of its 578 ETH profit — 566 ETH, worth about $1.25 million — as a bribe to the block's validator, as one observer tracked, retaining only around 2% for itself. The recipient of that bribe was a solo validator.

Notably, the same bot address is tagged on Etherscan as having intercepted and returned funds from two prior hack attempts.

03The broader dynamic

MEV extraction increasingly resembles a race to the bottom among bots competing for the same opportunities. As illiquid pools and user errors continue to surface on Uniswap, DeFi's largest DEX by volume, bots compete fiercely enough that they now surrender the overwhelming majority of their profits as block-inclusion bribes, leaving validators — and increasingly, liquid-staking providers that control validator sets — as the biggest beneficiaries. The libmev dashboard tracks this ongoing competition among searchers.

This isn't the first time a predatory bot has been undone by a rival, as seen in past examples of on-chain infighting among MEV actors. Whether the gains come from sandwich attacks, fat-finger mistakes, or outright exploits, the question of whether recipients should return ill-gotten MEV remains unresolved — Lido has stated it does not intend to return such funds in at least one prior case involving the Sushi exploit.

As competition compresses bot margins toward zero, validators are left collecting a growing share of the spoils — a trend that may further concentrate rewards among liquid-staking giants, or alternatively push more participants toward solo staking in hopes of winning a bribe outright.