Yesterday I noticed some unusual swaps in Yield Basis related pools on Curve. At first, I was very worried (always good to check when you see something unusual), but it appeared that the reason was someone exchanging 50M USDT to 36k USD worth of AAVE (sic!) [https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/2032193345414664659].

On Aave, you can essentially swap collateral via an external exchange platform - CowSwap in this case. Aave (rightfully) made a warning that it's gonna be 99.9% slippage. But who reads warnings? What's slippage anyway? The user (on mobile!) pressed "proceed anyway". Rekt.

New wave of DeFi users are way less smart than we used to be in 2020, and same methods do not work! So... what can we do for them?

One thing: if there is an alternative how to do this action better - it's good if UI switches to the better way. In this case it'd be a limit order (but also TWAP could have been better).

Another one: I think that the method which CowSwap uses (e.g. competition between solvers) is unsuitable for such large swaps (and in this case, solvers failed even more miserably - they could've returned up to 7M worth of AAVE). IMO a much better way is what 1inch does: a moving limit order which can be arbitraged with CEXes as well. Maybe that's a better model overall. Cow wins competition not so much with technology but with a very very good UX.

And of course for users: it's totally not good to operate with any meaningfully large amounts from mobile. Mobile-first and big money are not very compatible.