The recent Uniswap incident, where a user swapped approximately 1,126 ETH (~$2.01M) for just 5,776 AVAIL worth around $14,000, was not a sandwich attack, according to security platform GoPlus. Instead, it was the result of a same-block backrunner arbitrage that exploited a massive pricing error in an illiquid liquidity pool.
Here's how it happened:
The swap route directed a very large amount of WETH into an AVAIL/WETH pool with extremely low liquidity. Because automated market makers (AMMs) determine prices based on the ratio of assets inside the pool, pushing such a large trade through a shallow pool dramatically distorted the price.
As the transaction executed, the pool's price of $AVAIL skyrocketed, causing the user to buy the token at roughly 120x above its actual market value. In other words, the user unknowingly accepted an extremely unfavorable execution price because there wasn't enough liquidity to absorb the trade efficiently.
The opportunity was immediately detected by a backrunner, a specialized MEV searcher that monitors transactions after they enter the mempool or block construction process. Unlike a sandwich attack—which places one transaction before and another after the victim—a backrunner simply executes after the victim's trade within the same block.
Once the victim's swap inflated the AVAIL price, the backrunner purchased only a small amount of AVAIL at the real market price elsewhere and instantly sold it into the now-overpriced AVAIL/WETH pool. This allowed the searcher to extract approximately 1,072 WETH in profit from the temporary price distortion.
According to GoPlus, the majority of that profit—around 1,018 ETH—was paid to Titan Builder as a builder payment, securing priority for the transaction to be included in the same block before anyone else could exploit the opportunity.
This incident demonstrates that not every major trading loss is caused by a sandwich attack. Even without front-running the victim, MEV participants can capture enormous profits whenever a large transaction creates a severe price imbalance in an illiquid pool. It also serves as a reminder that executing large swaps through low-liquidity routes without sufficient slippage protection can lead to catastrophic losses within a single block.
BitcoinSistemi
2025/12/21 20:20
Watch Out: Large Token Unlocks in 20 Altcoins This Week – Here’s the Day-by-Day, Hour-by-Hour List
The cryptocurrency market experienced a period of continued declines in altcoins last week, with a few exceptions. Among the altcoins that saw gains despite the overall market were the privacy-focused XMR and ZEC.
However, there will be significant token unlocks across numerous altcoins in the new week. Here is the token unlock schedule we have prepared for you at Bitcoinsistemi.com.
(All times are given in UTC+3 Turkish time)
0G (0G)
Market Value: $163.27 million
Tokens Unlocked: $6.69 million (4.09%)
Date: December 22, 2025, 03:00
Space ID (ID)
Market Value: $73.83 million
Tokens Unlocked: $4.42 million (6.00%)
Date: December 22, 2025, 11:00 PM
Zora (ZORA)
Market Value: $194.58 million
Tokens Unlocked: $6.11 million (3.15%)
Date: December 23, 2025, 03:00
Meteora (MET)
Market Value: $109.26 million
Tokens Unlocked: $1.61 million (1.47%)
Date: December 23, 2025, 03:00
Avail (AVAIL)
Market Value: $24.27 million
Tokens Unlocked: $1.54 million (6.33%)
Date: December 23, 2025, 03:00
SoSoValue (SOSO)
Market Value: $151.78 million
Tokens Unlocked: $3.74 million (2.46%)
Date: December 24, 2025, 03:00
Humanity (H)
Market Value: $258.79 million
Tokens Unlocked: $18.67 million (7.19%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
Plasma (XPL)
Market Value: $230.94 million
Tokens Unlocked: $11.39 million (4.94%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
Venom (VENOM)
Market Value: $91.87 million
Tokens Unlocked: $2.46 million (2.68%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
ChainOpera AI (COAI)
Market Value: $85.10 million
Tokens Unlocked: $3.58 million (4.23%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
Irys (IRYS)
Market Value: $66.66 million
Tokens Unlocked: $2.48 million (3.72%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
OVERTAKE (TAKE)
Market Value: $58.06 million
Tokens Unlocked: $4.82 million (8.31%)
Date: December 25, 2025, 03:00
GateToken (GT)
Market Value: $818.14 million
Tokens Unlocked: $68.14 million (8.30%)
Date: December 26, 2025, 03:00
Sahara AI (SAHARA)
Market Value: $54.30 million
Tokens Unlocked: $3.67 million (6.77%)
Date: December 26, 2025, 3:00 PM
Axelar (AXL)
Market Value: $90.29 million
Tokens Unlocked: $1.03 million (1.14%)
Date: December 27, 2025, 08:00
Jupiter (JUP)
Market Value: $588.80 million
Tokens Unlocked: $9.90 million (1.68%)
Date: December 28, 2025, 03:00
Grass (GRASS)
Market Value: $128.97 million
Tokens Unlocked: $9.32 million (7.25%)
Date: December 28, 2025, 03:00
Sign
Market Value: $41.38 million
Tokens Unlocked: $1.69 million (4.10%)
Date: December 28, 2025, 03:00
Maverick Protocol (MAV)
Market Value: $20.33 million
Tokens Unlocked: $1.40 million (6.85%)
Date: December 28, 2025, 03:00
Open Campus (EDU)
Market Value: $92.58 million
Tokens Unlocked: $3.09 million (3.34%)
Date: December 28, 2025, 6:00 PM
*This is not investment advice.
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The Block
2025/12/20 23:04
Peter Thiel's Founders Fund co-leads $27 million seed round for modular blockchain project Avail
Avail, a modular blockchain project that spun out of Polygon last year, has raised $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Dragonfly.
Other investors in the round included SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, and several unidentified angel investors, Avail said Monday.
Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, declined to comment on the structure of the round and valuation, but a source with knowledge of the matter said the round was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens and gave Avail a fully diluted valuation of several hundred million dollars.
Arjun said Avail is currently raising another round of funding, so "we are unable to disclose the valuation until completion" and cannot comment on "structure and FDV at this point of time."
Avail commenced operations within Polygon in late 2020 and was funded from Polygon's treasury until March 2023, when it became an independent entity separate from Polygon. As it approaches its mainnet launch, Avail has raised external funding.
What is Avail?
Avail is a modular blockchain project aiming to streamline the rollup experience since it believes numerous rollups, including app-specific ones, will power blockchain scalability.
"Rollups scale execution by taking compute off-chain, but the growth of rollups places substantial demands on Ethereum for data availability," Arjun told The Block. "It will take a few years for Danksharding to be fully implemented, which means that the Ethereum blobspace needs to be scaled using a validity-proof enabled, responsive, scalable data availability layer. This is what Avail DA solves for," he said.
DA is the first of Avail's "Trinity" offerings. The other two are Nexus and Fusion Security. Nexus enables a permissionless verification hub that will unify rollups, leveraging Avail DA as the root of trust, Arjun said. Fusion Security, on the other hand, will take the native assets of the most mature ecosystems, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and allow them to contribute additional security to the Avail ecosystem, Arjun added.
Fusion Security sounds similar to restaking. Arjun said it has indeed taken inspiration from EigenLayer, Babylon and Osmosis. However, Avail Fusion Security differs from these projects as "it borrows economic security from other assets but penalizes both safety and liveness failures in the Avail consensus," he said.
Modular projects gaining popularity
Modular blockchain projects are rising in popularity, especially after Celestia's launch late last year. Earlier this month, modular projects Lava and Inco raised funds, too.
When asked how Avail is different from other modular projects, Arjun said besides technical differences, other projects focus on only one component of modularity, such as data availability or data access. "Avail's products focus on a much broader scope and exist to mitigate the user experience fragmentation that comes with rollup proliferation," he said.
Avail's tech stack enables "a more modular design space" for projects to build on its infrastructure, Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement. "By decoupling the different layers of the blockchain, Avail unlocks orders of magnitude scalability improvements and helps solve the current fragmentation issues in the space, Krug added.
Avail DA is currently in testnet, and mainnet is expected to launch around April, Arjun said. Meanwhile, the first iteration of Nexus will launch later this year, and Fusion Security is expected to go live next year, he added.
There are currently 43 people working for Avail, with its core team based in Dubai, and Arjun is looking to hire more people across functions, including engineering and business development.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures. © 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
