A trader just learned a brutally expensive lesson in DeFi. They swapped $2.01 million worth of Ether on a decentralized exchange — and ended up with just $14,500 in tokens. That’s a 99.3% loss, gone in one transaction.
The problem? The order routed through a low-liquidity pool. An Ethereum block builder named Titan spotted the opportunity and pocketed $1.8 million from a same-block arbitrage play. GoPlus Security called it a “textbook case of same-block backrun extraction.” Not a sandwich attack — something more surgical.
Here’s what happened. The swap pushed about 1,117 ETH into a thin AVAIL/WETH pool on Uniswap v3. That forced the trade to execute at roughly 120 times what AVAIL could actually be sold for. The router involved, 0x router, then sold a small batch of externally sourced AVAIL into that same pool, extracted roughly 1,072 WETH, and paid Titan 1,018 ETH as a builder reward. The victim’s AVAIL got swapped into $14,200 worth of LIT tokens.
Crypto trader Ruslan Khairullin put it bluntly: “This is what happens when you clicked confirm faster than you read the route.” His advice — read the transaction route before signing. Don’t trust blindly.
Titan Builder has now made $112.6 million in revenue from block building services this year. Its biggest single day came in March, when it extracted roughly $34 million from a MEV bot incident on CoW Protocol.
The broader point? MEV risks from liquidity routers are still very real. Hackers, scammers, and now extraction bots — they’re all operating in the same space. A little caution before hitting confirm can save you millions.
