Circle disclosed late on Friday, March 10 that $3.3 billion of the USDC reserve — roughly 8% of cash backing — sat at Silicon Valley Bank, which had been taken into receivership earlier that day. Redemption queues stalled, secondary markets reopened first, and the price fell from $1.00 through Saturday into a Sunday low near $0.87 — a peak deviation of 13.0% below peg, the largest ever recorded for the issuer.
The deviation closed in under two days. On Sunday, March 12, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Treasury jointly announced that all SVB deposits would be made whole; Circle confirmed access to the funds before Monday open and posted a primary-source statement. By the New York session on March 13, USDC was trading at parity again and the curated annotation for the incident pins the cluster to the Sunday-low timestamp rather than the Friday disclosure.
What to watch next time
Banking-channel concentration risk on regulated USD stablecoins remains a structural exposure, not a one-off. Watch the disclosure cadence around quarterly attestations and the named-bank composition of cash reserves, particularly for issuers with a single primary settlement bank. A federal backstop is not the base case; the recovery here was contingent on a specific policy decision over a specific weekend.