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.
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Reflexive collapse case studies
Start with the older evergreen failures that explain reflexive collapse patterns before reading the full archive.
TerraUSD: the death spiral that erased $18 billion
Terra UST and LUNA show how reflexive redemption loops, subsidized demand, and exit liquidity can collapse together.
Read the case studyIRON Finance & TITAN: the algorithmic prequel to Terra
IRON and TITAN are the compact death-spiral case for fractional collateral, confidence breaks, and reflexive governance-token supply.
Read the case studyFei Protocol: the peg that broke at birth
Fei Protocol is the incentive-design case study: direct incentives, protocol-controlled value, and what breaks when peg defense fights users.
Read the case studyOutcome
Mechanism
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 2023Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsSurvived02Flight to safety
LUSD: the peg that held during the SVB weekend
While USDC, Dai, and FRAX broke below $0.90 in March 2023, LUSD — backed only by on-chain ETH and an arbitrage-enforced redemption floor — traded at a premium and repegged in under 15 hours.
March 2023Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Survived03Algorithmic 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 2022Reflexive / UnbackedDied04CDP 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 2023Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Survived05Venue 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 2025Hedged Synthetic DollarSurvived06Redemption-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 2025Tokenized Credit FundWounded07CDP 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.
2023–2025Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Survived08Governance depeg
sUSD and SIP-420: the depeg a governance vote chose
Synthetix did not get hacked and did not go insolvent. It voted to pool its debt and drop the collateral ratio — and in doing so removed the very incentive that had kept sUSD at a dollar.
2025Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Wounded09Algorithmic 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 2021Reflexive / UnbackedDied10Algorithmic collapse
Neutrino USD: the stablecoin collapse before Terra
A WAVES-collateralized algorithmic stablecoin that broke peg in April 2022 on circular-leverage allegations, never durably recovered, and was quietly retired as the floating index token XTN.
April 2022Reflexive / UnbackedDied11Algorithmic 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.
2021–2022Reflexive / UnbackedDied12Operational-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 2026Hedged Synthetic DollarDied13Composability cascade
Stream Finance: loss broke three stablecoins
A ~$93M off-chain trading loss at Stream Finance detonated a ~$285M cross-protocol cascade, because xUSD had been re-hypothecated as leveraged collateral across lending markets that priced it at a hardcoded $1.
November 2025Hedged Synthetic DollarDied14Opacity discount
USDf and the opacity discount
In July 2025 Falcon's USDf became the first delta-neutral synthetic dollar to be wounded by what holders could not see — opaque off-chain collateral and a seven-day redemption lag — rather than by anything its mechanism actually did wrong.
July 2025Hedged Synthetic DollarWounded15Reflexive bank run
FDUSD and the insolvency tweet
A fully-reserved dollar stablecoin lost its peg for hours in April 2025 — not because its backing failed, but because a high-profile competitor publicly called its custodian insolvent and the market ran first and checked later.
April 2025Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsWounded16Regulatory shutdown
BUSD: the regulator's off-switch
The third-largest stablecoin did not depeg — it was lawfully wound down. A fully-reserved, solvent coin can still die by order.
February 2023Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsDied17Bridge failure
Multichain USDC: the bridge died, not the dollar
Bridge-wrapped USDC on Fantom fell to roughly $0.22 in July 2023 while real USDC never moved a basis point — the backing lived on a bridge that one arrested founder controlled outright.
July 2023Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsDied18Exchange-collapse contagion
The FTX weekend: which pegs broke
When the second-largest crypto exchange collapsed in November 2022, the stablecoins that wobbled weren't the weakest by design — they were the ones standing closest to Alameda's order flow.
November 2022Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsDied19Regulatory exit
Euro Tether: the stablecoin that died by jurisdiction
EURT never broke its euro peg. In November 2024 Tether simply withdrew it rather than pursue MiCA authorization — the first wave of EU rules retired a non-dollar stablecoin instead of cracking it.
November 2024Custodial Cash and Cash-EquivalentsDied20Reflexive collateral
USDD: when the issuer pulled the Bitcoin
No dramatic depeg — the shock was structural: the TRON DAO Reserve quietly withdrew ~12,000 BTC, leaving USDD backed almost entirely by TRX, before a 2025 redesign into an overcollateralized CDP.
2024-2025Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Wounded21Collateral contagion
Kava USDX: one toxic collateral leg
An overcollateralized CDP dollar broke its peg in May 2022 because a single whitelisted collateral asset — TerraUSD — collapsed, and it never durably recovered.
May 2022Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Died22Bridge bad debt
MAI: the bridge that broke the peg
QiDao's overcollateralized stablecoin lost its dollar in 2023 — not because its collateral fell, but because the Multichain bridge collapse stranded the assets backing the MAI minted on Fantom and seeded bad debt that the multichain footprint propagated.
2023–2024Crypto-Collateralized (CDP)Wounded23Chronic 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)Tokenized Credit FundWounded24Correlated collateral shock
apxUSD and the Bitcoin-treasury collateral chain
Apyx markets apxUSD as an RWA-backed dollar, but roughly 62% of its reserve is Strategy preferred equity — a Bitcoin-correlated asset that fell with crypto in early June 2026, opening a downside depeg that is still unresolved.
June 2026 (ongoing)Tokenized Credit FundWounded