The cryptocurrency world has created some wealthy winners, but others haven't been so lucky.
Rapper 50 Cent profited heavily from a clever Bitcoin investment he'd completely forgotten about, while Lily Allen branded herself an 'idiot' for not getting involved earlier.
Meanwhile, some have given up decade-long searches for Bitcoin to a landfill site and one student who forgot about investing $27 in Bitcoin back in 2009 could have been sitting on a jaw-dropping fortune today.
That's not to say the crypto market hasn't experienced any dramatic swings though.
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Bitcoin experts recently issued warnings as nearly $1 trillion was wiped from the market. When President Trump returned to the White House, Bitcoin prices nearly doubled due to his administration's crypto-friendly policies and promises to make America a 'crypto superpower.'
Now, one crypto investor has made a costly error that resulted in losing around $50 million in a single transaction.
On 12 March, a crypto wallet on the Ethereum network exchanged $50,432,688 worth of USDT-backed tokens for roughly 327 AAVE tokens, valued at $36,000.
According to Fintech Weekly, the investor ended up paying around $154,000 per token, which is far above the market rate of approximately $114.
Crazily enough, the investor was actually warned about the potential disaster when the AAVE interface displayed an ‘extraordinary slippage’ warning.
The message had a checkbox that required manual confirmation before the transaction could proceed, which the anonymous investor seemingly ticked.
“Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE using $50M USDT through the Aave interface,” Aave founder Stani Kulechov wrote in an X post. “Given the unusually large size of the single order, the interface warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox."
He added: “The user confirmed the warning on their mobile device and proceeded with the swap, accepting the high slippage, which ultimately resulted in receiving only 324 AAVE in return.”
Kulechov claimed that events like this do occur, but the scale of this transaction was 'significantly larger than what is typically seen in the space.'
The CEO said he ‘sympathised’ with the investor and would attempt to contact them to return $600,000 in fees that AAVE collected.
However, the rest of the millions are pretty much gone for good.
Kulechov concluded that better guardrails are needed in the industry to protect users, as he and his team are 'investigating ways to improve these safeguards going forward.'