Analysis: Arbitrage Window Emerges On-Chain During Binance Hack, Single Address Profits Approximately $3.47 Million in Two Hours
Odaily Report: During the Binance attack, an obvious arbitrage opportunity emerged on-chain. According to a community user's review, the attacker, in order to avoid Tether freezing, swapped a large amount of USDT for ETH through DEXs, causing the ETH price on Uniswap to briefly rise to $2,560–$2,750, with some individual trades exceeding $3,000, while Aave's ETH price obtained through the Chainlink oracle remained at $2,250–$2,290. A price gap of 15% to 30% appeared between on-chain and oracle prices, lasting nearly an hour.Arbitrageurs exploited this price gap by depositing USDC/USDT as collateral into Aave, borrowing ETH at the oracle price, then selling it at high prices on DEXs, and buying back ETH to repay the loans once the spread narrowed. According to the user's statistics, within 6 hours after the incident, a total of 61 addresses borrowed ETH on Aave mainnet (excluding the hacker's address). Among them, the most profitable address sold 12,289 ETH at an average price of approximately $2,580, then bought back 12,314 ETH at an average price of approximately $2,297, earning about $3.47 million. The top ten arbitrage addresses collectively profited approximately $6.36 million.The user stated that the arbitrageurs exploited the price disconnection between centralized exchanges and DEXs, and that the Aave contract itself had no vulnerability. As DEX prices fell back and Aave froze the mainnet V3 market, the arbitrage window gradually closed. The above profits are based on transaction-by-transaction on-chain statistics and have not yet deducted Gas fees.