Stablecoin Depeg History: Major Depegs and Their Root Causes

By Owen Thurm Published November 6, 2026 6 min read

Quick answer. The biggest include TerraUSD (2022, a run on its algorithmic design) and USDC (2023, $3.3 billion stuck at SVB). Later came Stream's xUSD (2025, a $93 million fund loss) and Resolv's USR (2026, a compromised minting key).

Watch: Stablecoin Depeg History: Major Depegs and Their Root Causes 1:42

Video transcript

Since 2022, stablecoin depegs trace back to five root causes. Some coins recovered within days, but the deepest never did.

Two depegs recovered within hours or days. No coin in our table that fell below fifty cents regained its peg for good.

TerraUSD collapsed by design. USDC dipped when Silicon Valley Bank failed. Stream's xUSD lost its backing, and Resolv's USR fell after a minting key was compromised.

The causes sort into five groups: reserves, design, exploits, keys, and market breaks, when liquidity leaves or one venue breaks away.

Circle had three point three billion dollars of USDC reserves at Silicon Valley Bank. USDC still recovered, back above ninety nine cents in about two days.

Resolv's USR shows the key risk. One account held the minting role, with no multisig and no mint cap. An attacker minted fifty million USR, which hit two and a half cents in seventeen minutes.

Watch for concentrated cash, backing lent to one party, uncapped minting, a single key, and incentive changes. And check other venues before calling a depeg.

Several of these depegs began with a supply jump or a privileged call. Guardian's Managed Security watches contracts on every block, reviews every multisig transaction before signing, and runs a round the clock team with a fifteen minute SLA on critical alerts.

Read the full table with sources in the article, or talk to Guardian about catching the mint before the market does.

This report lists the major depegs since 2022: the low, how long it lasted and what broke. Every figure comes from the sources cited.

The pattern is blunt. Two depegs recovered within hours or days. No coin in our table that fell below $0.50 regained its peg for good.

Depegs by Year

Stablecoin	When	Low	Recovered?	Root cause
Cashio CASH	Mar 23, 2022	$0.00005	No	Exploit: infinite mint bug
TerraUSD (UST)	May 7 to 13, 2022	Under $0.20 by May 13	No	Design: algorithmic peg, run
USDC	Mar 11, 2023	$0.877	Yes, in about 2 days	Reserves: $3.3B at failed SVB
sUSD (Synthetix)	Apr 2025	$0.23 by Jun 2026 (daily)	No, retired	Design: peg incentive removed
USDe (Ethena)	Oct 10, 2025	$0.65 on Binance only	Yes, about an hour across markets	Market: Binance's own pricing, per Ethena
xUSD (Stream)	Nov 3, 2025	95% off peg by Nov 18	No	Reserves: $93M lost by a fund manager
deUSD (Elixir)	Nov 2025	sdeUSD 99.8% off peg	No	Reserves: 65% lent to Stream
USR (Resolv)	Mar 22, 2026	$0.025 on main Curve pool	No	Keys: minting key, no cap
USDR (StablR)	May 24, 2026	$0.01 by Jun 4 (hourly)	No	Keys: one multisig key

How we built the table

Lows: from the outlet or DefiLlama incident note cited, or DefiLlama prices where marked hourly or daily.
Venues: DefiLlama prices blend markets. One venue can trade lower, as USDe did on Binance.
Recovered: back above $0.99 and staying there, in DefiLlama's hourly data (pulled November 6, 2026).
Hourly data smooths wicks. USR's first-month hourly low was $0.098.
Left out: depegs we could not tie to a sourced cause.

Root Cause Categories

Reserves: the backing is lost, frozen or lent out. USDC, xUSD, deUSD.
Design: the peg mechanism fails under stress. UST, sUSD.
Exploit: a code bug lets an attacker mint or borrow. Cashio.
Keys: an attacker holds a key the contract trusts. USR, USDR.
Market: liquidity leaves, or one venue's price breaks away. USDe on Binance.

USDe on Binance, October 2025

On October 10, 2025, USDe fell as low as $0.65 on Binance, AMBCrypto reported. It dropped about 5% on Bybit and 0.8% on Kraken.

On Curve, Uniswap and Fluid, it stayed within 30 basis points. Across markets, DefiLlama's hourly price touched $0.972 for one hour.

Ethena said minting and redemption stayed online and processed more than $2 billion within 24 hours.

Its founder blamed Binance's own pricing and said one venue out of line was not a USDe depeg.

Reserve and Banking Failures

USDC and Silicon Valley Bank

Silicon Valley Bank failed on March 10, 2023. That night, Circle wrote: "$3.3 billion of the ~$40 billion of USDC reserves remain at SVB."

USDC fell as low as $0.8774 over the weekend, Forkast reported. Circle later said the deposit "will be fully recovered when banks open on Monday in the U.S."

In DefiLlama's hourly prices, USDC was back above $0.99 by about 10:00 UTC on Monday, March 13.

Stream's xUSD and Elixir's deUSD

On November 3, 2025, Stream said "an external fund manager overseeing Stream funds disclosed the loss of approximately $93 million in Stream fund assets."

It suspended withdrawals and deposits. xUSD traded at $0.26 on CoinGecko the next day, Decrypt reported, and Protos called it 95% depegged by November 18.

The loss spread to Elixir. It had lent $68 million of USDC to Stream against xUSD, 65% of deUSD's backing, Coinspeaker reported.

Protos put Elixir's sdeUSD 99.8% below peg.

How it reached lenders who never held xUSD is in our post on vault curator risk.

Design and Reflexivity Failures

TerraUSD, May 2022

UST was an algorithmic stablecoin. Anyone could swap one UST for $1 of LUNA, and arbitrage was meant to hold the peg.

Terra's Anchor protocol paid UST depositors a steady 19.5%. An NBER study found those yields were heavily subsidized, and the run began with withdrawals from it.

May 7: two large addresses withdrew 375 million UST from Anchor.
Late May 9: LUNA's market value fell to equal UST's supply; UST dropped to $0.75.
May 7 to 13: users swapped $4.65 billion of UST for LUNA, diluting LUNA further.
End of May 13: UST was below $0.20.

The study calls it a "death spiral." About $50 billion of value was gone in three days.

Synthetix sUSD, 2025 to 2026

sUSD slipped below $0.99 at times from September 2024. Its slide deepened in April 2025, shortly after a governance change called SIP-420 took effect.

Analytics firm Parsec said SIP-420 pooled stakers' debt and cut the collateral ratio from 500% to 200%.

"Stakers don't have skin in the game when sUSD trades off peg," Parsec wrote, per crypto.news. sUSD hit $0.73 on April 17, 2025, in DefiLlama's daily prices.

It never recovered. SIP-423, created June 12, 2026, retires sUSD.

Exploit and Key Compromise Depegs

Next, attackers: a bug or a stolen key creates supply that nothing backs.

Cashio, March 2022

Two missing account checks let fake tokens count as collateral.

About 2 billion CASH were minted and swapped for $52.8 million. CASH fell to $0.00005, per DefiLlama.

Stolen keys

On March 22, 2026, an attacker deposited 100,000 USDC into Resolv's minting contract and received 50 million USR. A second mint added 30 million.

Onchain analyst Andrew Hong traced the breach to a minting role held by one externally owned account, not a multisig, The Block reported.

The Block added that the contract "lacked oracle checks, amount validation, and maximum mint limits."

DefiLlama says that key sat in Resolv's AWS KMS environment, and $24.5 million was extracted.

USR hit $0.025 on its main Curve pool within 17 minutes of the first mint, per The Block.

Two months later, one of StablR's three multisig keys was compromised. The attacker minted 8.35 million USDR and 4.5 million EURR against zero collateral, per DefiLlama.

USDR fell to $0.41 that day. After a brief rebound, it was near $0.01 by June 4, in DefiLlama's hourly prices.

The fixes, from onchain mint caps to supply alerts, are in how infinite mint exploits happen and our stablecoin security guide.

Early Warning Signals

Concentrated cash: about 8% of USDC's reserves sat at SVB.
Backing lent to one party: 65% of deUSD's backing was a loan to Stream.
Uncapped minting: USR's contract had no maximum mint or amount check.
One key, no multisig: one account controlled USR minting.
Incentive changes: sUSD after SIP-420.
Lopsided pools: some sUSD Curve pools held over 90% sUSD, crypto.news reported.
One venue only: check other markets before calling a depeg, as with USDe.

To weigh all of this, use a stablecoin risk assessment, which knocks out any coin trading over 2% below peg.

How Guardian Helps

Several of these depegs began with a supply jump or a privileged call. Guardian's Managed Security watches for both.

Contracts monitored on every block: privileged calls, role changes, upgrades and large fund movements.
Every multisig transaction reviewed before it is signed.
A 24/7 MDR team with a 15-minute SLA on Critical alerts.

Guardian's operational resilience assessment exercises a depeg, key compromise and oracle failure as tabletops and as technical tests.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the biggest stablecoin depeg?

TerraUSD in May 2022. An NBER study describes a run that wiped out $50 billion of value in three days. UST was below $0.20 by May 13 and never recovered.

Why did USDC depeg in March 2023?

Circle had $3.3 billion of about $40 billion in USDC reserves at Silicon Valley Bank when it failed. USDC fell to about $0.877 and recovered within about two days.

Do stablecoins recover after a depeg?

Some do. USDC recovered in about two days, and USDe in about an hour across markets. In our table, no coin that fell below $0.50 regained its peg for good, including UST, xUSD and USR.

What is the most common cause of a stablecoin depeg?

No single cause dominates: reserves caused three depegs in our table, design and keys two each, and exploits and market breaks one each. All four since November 2025 came from lost backing or compromised keys.

Sources

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