Borrowing on Aave when I should have been in bed
Good morning/evening
So when I was contemplating getting my degen on and getting back into DeFi, I had spent quite some time debating whether I really wanted to get back into borrowing on DeFi, especially with all the hacks and exploits we have seen recently. I had pretty much talked myself out of it, then back into it, then out of it again but the other evening there was a bit of a drop in the Bitcoin price so I thought now is the time, the key word in that sentence was evening, I was shattered and pretty much ready for bed but thought I have done this many times, know what I am doing it will only take half an hour!
Perhaps you are thinking what was it that I was doing, well I was back on Aave, borrowing stables to buy Bitcoin, it did me well last cycle, and although I do have more reservations this time than I did last cycle I thought just do it, be sensible don't go all in and keep it at a level that may account for any huge naughty Binance wicks (10/10/25).
The first moment of absolute horror was logging in to Metamask ......Empty wtf, take a minute, don't cry just yet, ah wrong account phew, get to the right account. Ok panic over it's late just get it done, stop looking at the Bitcoin price going up every few minutes, oh well, it is what it is.
Next step, borrow stablecoin, swap to WBTC (yes I know, not real Bitcoin, yes 1 more layer of risk on something that is already risky). Ok so now check the numbers, all looks good, then thought ok perhaps just do a little more, 1 more transaction then that's it, you know when I said I had done this many times, there is always that one time when you do not pay attention and mess it up, well that was now, just when I thought I had borrowed just a little more stablecoin to do the same swap I had done only 10 minutes earlier, I looked, refreshed, thought to myself where is the money! Nothing showing on the dashboard........Make sure I am on the same version, same chain etc all ok, go to Metamask and look at transactions and there it was, aPolUSDCn. What on earth was that doing there? Well, it appears that instead of borrowing more USDC, I had somehow managed to supply it to Aave instead!
So that transaction needs to be fixed, withdrawn and then start again, not a biggie, just a pain and another transaction fee! Then another mistake where I borrowed WBTC instead of a stablecoin, so that had to be paid off and changed back!
Well eventually I corrected that and did what I intended to do in the first place, checked everything was correct, looked at the health rating, made sure that was good and there was enough collateral. Effectively I am now long on Bitcoin but with my health rating well above 2 Bitcoin would need to drop over 50% for me to get liquidated, I have alerts set so if it gets to even half of that I can add more collateral. ( This does depend on what and how much collateral you have, and also if you have two volatile assets) For a complete breakdown on this see https://app.aave.com
So what have I learned from all this? Well, apparently not a lot, because I already knew that making financial decisions when you are shattered is a terrible idea. Yet there I was, clicking away on Aave when I should have been in bed. So a quick transaction turned out to take a bit more than the intended half an hour before bed, and that there is exactly what happens when you are tired and not fully paying attention, luckily it was nothing massive and all it cost me were a few extra transaction fees, which although not like Solana fees, were not the lowest, but it could have been a lot worse.
Oh well that is all for now, feel free to tell me about your situations when being exhausted caused you to make a mistake, as always, thank you for reading.
