Odaily reported that a clear on-chain arbitrage opportunity emerged during the Binance exploit.
According to a reconstruction by a community user, the attacker swapped large amounts of USDT for ETH through DEXs to avoid a Tether freeze. That move pushed ETH on Uniswap to as high as $2,560 to $2,750, with some individual trades clearing above $3,000. At the same time, Aave’s ETH price, sourced from the Chainlink oracle, remained at roughly $2,250 to $2,290. The gap between on-chain execution prices and the oracle price reached 15% to 30% and lasted for nearly an hour.
How the trade worked
The user said arbitrageurs used the spread by depositing USDC or USDT into Aave as collateral, borrowing ETH at the oracle price, and selling that ETH on DEXs at the higher market price. After the spread narrowed, they bought back ETH and repaid the loan, capturing the difference.
61 addresses borrowed ETH on Aave mainnet within six hours
Based on the user’s count, 61 addresses borrowed ETH on Aave mainnet within six hours after the incident, excluding the hacker address. The most profitable address sold 12,289 ETH at an average price of about $2,580, then later bought back 12,314 ETH at an average price of about $2,297, generating an estimated profit of about $3.47 million.
The top 10 arbitrage addresses made about $6.36 million in total. The figures were calculated from on-chain transaction-by-transaction records and do not include gas costs.
No flaw in the Aave contract, the user said
The community user said the trade exploited a pricing disconnect between centralized exchanges and DEXs, and that there was no vulnerability in the Aave contract itself. The arbitrage window gradually closed as DEX prices fell back and Aave froze its mainnet V3 market.
