When the peg broke
Practitioner retrospectives of the depegs and failures that reshaped the stablecoin market — what happened, why the design produced it, and what each one left behind. Built on Pharos data.
01Reserve banking shock
USDC and the Silicon Valley Bank weekend
A fully-reserved dollar stablecoin lost its peg for two days in March 2023 — not because its backing failed, but because one of the banks holding that backing did.
March 2023Survived02Algorithmic collapse
TerraUSD: the death spiral that erased $18 billion
An uncollateralized mint-burn stablecoin propped up by a 20% yield unwound in six days, hyperinflating LUNA and dragging UST to a dime.
May 2022Died03CDP under stress
Dai: Black Thursday and the PSM dependency
A crypto-collateralized stablecoin that survived two very different shocks — broken liquidations in 2020 and inherited reserve risk in 2023 — and was reshaped by each.
March 2020 & March 2023Survived04Venue oracle dislocation
USDe and the October 2025 Binance oracle print
During the 10 October 2025 crypto-wide deleveraging, USDe printed as low as ~$0.65 on Binance while its backing and primary-market redemption stayed intact — a venue artifact, not a peg break.
October 2025Survived05Redemption-terms shock
USD0++ depeg: when Usual changed the redemption floor
A governance decision, not a backing failure, repriced Usual's locked USD0++ to roughly 89 cents and set off a deleveraging cascade across Morpho.
January 2025Wounded06CDP resilience
crvUSD's exploit trilogy: three shocks, no collapse
Three exploit-driven stress events across two years each pushed crvUSD off peg by single-digit percentages — and each time it recovered within hours.
2023–2025Survived07Algorithmic collapse
IRON Finance & TITAN: the algorithmic prequel to Terra
A partially collateralized stablecoin whose redemption loop minted its own share token into oblivion — crypto's first large-scale bank run, eleven months before UST.
June 2021Died08Algorithmic collapse
Fei Protocol: the peg that broke at birth
A $1.3B genesis raise and a reflexive incentive engine could not hold the dollar; after an $80M lending hack, Tribe DAO voted to wind the whole thing down.
2021–2022Died09Operational-security failure
Resolv USD: when one key minted eighty million
USR was a delta-neutral synthetic dollar with an insurance tranche and real-time reserve attestations. None of it mattered once a single privileged key could mint unbacked supply with no cap.
March 2026Died10Chronic fragility
pmUSD and the in-situ gold collateral chain
RAAC's gold-RWA dollar token has never settled at par — hundreds of recorded sub-peg events, then a ~55.7% intraday crater on May 2, 2026 — yet it is still live. The story is structural, not a single blowup.
2026 (ongoing)Wounded