A decentralized exchange (DEX) trader lost nearly $2 million in an Ether swap after the transaction was routed through a low-liquidity pool, allowing a same-block arbitrage bot to extract almost the entire value. According to blockchain security firm GoPlus Security, the incident occurred on July 7, 2026, at 1:59 am UTC and resulted in the trader receiving just $14,500 worth of LIT tokens after swapping 1,126.44 ETH (worth about $2.01 million).
The transaction, which was executed through a 0x router, first swapped approximately 1,117 ETH for 6.68 million AVAIL tokens on Uniswap V3. This large purchase caused the AVAIL/WETH pool to become severely imbalanced, inflating AVAIL’s price by about 120 times its actual market value. The AVAIL tokens were then exchanged for roughly 14,508 USDC and finally converted into 5,775.66 LIT tokens on Uniswap V4.
GoPlus Security classified the exploit as a “textbook case of same-block backrun extraction,” not a traditional sandwich attack. Within the same Ethereum block, a backrunning searcher identified the price distortion and spent just 0.3942 WETH to acquire 2,154 AVAIL tokens from another source. By selling this small amount into the inflated pool, the searcher extracted approximately 1,072.46 WETH, representing the liquidity added by the victim’s swap. Of that, 1,018.25 ETH (about $1.8 million) was transferred to Titan Builder as a block-building reward.
Titan Builder has now accumulated $112.6 million in revenue from block-building services in 2026, with its largest single-day gain of $34 million coming in March during a separate MEV incident on the CoW Protocol. Crypto trader Ruslan Khairullin emphasized that the loss was avoidable, urging users to inspect DEX transaction routes before confirming. “This is what happens when you click confirm faster than you read the route,” he warned. The security firm stressed that Titan Builder did not directly take funds from the victim’s wallet but captured most of the extracted value through the block-building process.
