Every Major Stablecoin Depeg: A Complete Reference Table

Every Major Stablecoin Depeg: A Complete Reference Table

A stablecoin has exactly one job: hold $1. When it fails at that job — when the price slips to $0.97, or $0.82, or vanishes to a fraction of a cent — traders call it a depeg. Some depegs are five-minute scares that snap back the same afternoon. Others are death spirals that vaporize tens of billions of dollars and never recover.

This article is a single, verified reference for every major stablecoin depeg in crypto history, from Fei Protocol's rocky 2021 launch to the 2025 revival of peg breaks across Ethena, Synthetix, and First Digital. For each event you get the low it printed, the date, the dollars at risk, the cause in one line, and the one fact that matters most: did it ever get back to $1?

The stablecoin market crossed $300 billion for the first time in 2025, up from roughly $205 billion at the start of the year, with Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) together holding around 85% of it. That is real money — payroll, treasury reserves, trading collateral — sitting on the assumption that $1 stays $1. The history below is the case file for everything that can go wrong with that assumption.

How to read a depeg

Not all depegs are equal, and the single most useful thing you can know about a stablecoin is what backs it. That backing determines how it breaks.

• Fiat-backed (USDC, USDT, FDUSD): each token is supposed to be redeemable 1:1 for dollars or cash-equivalents held in reserve. These depeg from reserve or counterparty shocks — a bank holding the reserves fails, or the market doubts the issuer can pay. The breaks are sharp but usually shallow and recoverable.
• Crypto-collateralized (DAI, sUSD, USDD): backed by more than $1 of volatile crypto per token (over-collateralized). These depeg when the collateral crashes faster than the system can liquidate it, or when an oracle misfires.
• Algorithmic / seigniorage (TerraUSD, Neutrino, IRON): little or no hard collateral. The peg is defended by minting and burning a paired token and by sheer market confidence. When confidence breaks, there is nothing underneath — and these produce the catastrophic, permanent depegs.

Keep that hierarchy in mind. As the data shows, the further a stablecoin sits from real reserves, the further it tends to fall and the less likely it is to come back.

The complete stablecoin depeg reference table

Lows below are consensus spot prices on liquid venues; thin single-exchange ticks (the famous $0.51 USDT print, for example) are excluded as outliers. Where a figure is contested, the body text explains the range.

*USDe's $0.65 print was specific to Binance's internal oracle during the October 2025 cascade; the token held its peg on other venues, and Ethena disputes the "depeg" label.

The death spirals: depegs that never came back

The permanent failures cluster almost entirely in one design: algorithmic stablecoins with no real reserves.

The defining case is TerraUSD (UST). In May 2022 it was the third-largest stablecoin on earth, anchored by a $1-for-$1 swap with its sister token LUNA. When a wave of redemptions hit, the protocol minted ever more LUNA to absorb them — LUNA's supply hyperinflated from around 350 million tokens to over 6.5 trillion, its price collapsed, and the mechanism fed on itself in what's now the textbook "death spiral." UST slid to about $0.10 within days and then to pennies. The peak-to-trough destruction was roughly $40 billion (the figure cited in founder Do Kwon's fraud case), and the broader crypto market lost an estimated $400 billion in the contagion. UST never recovered; it trades today as "USTC" at a fraction of a cent. Chainalysis has a detailed post-mortem.

UST was not the first algorithmic blow-up, just the biggest. A year earlier, IRON Finance suffered what its own team called "crypto's first large-scale bank run." IRON was partially backed by its volatile partner token TITAN; on June 16, 2021, large holders pulled liquidity and dumped TITAN, which crashed from roughly $60 to effectively zero in hours. Protocol value evaporated from about $2 billion to nothing. The U.S. Federal Reserve later used IRON as a case study in how algorithmic stablecoins run.

Neutrino USD (USDN), backed by the WAVES token, broke peg to about $0.82 in April 2022 and depegged repeatedly through the year as the design proved chronically under-collateralized. It was eventually abandoned and rebranded; it never sustainably traded at $1 again.

Two more permanent failures came from very different designs — proof that you do not need to be "algorithmic" to die. HUSD, nominally a fiat-backed stablecoin, fell about 72% to $0.28 in late October 2022 after the Huobi exchange delisted its trading pairs following an ownership change — with no venue to support the price, the peg simply evaporated. And USD Real (USDR), backed largely by tokenized real estate, collapsed to about $0.51 in October 2023 when a redemption rush drained its only liquid reserves (a ~$12 million DAI treasury) in roughly four hours, leaving holders staring at property that could not be sold on demand.

The pattern is brutal but clear: when the thing backing a stablecoin is illiquid, volatile, or imaginary, a run finds the bottom fast.

The scares that snapped back: depegs that recovered

Now the more reassuring half of the ledger — the depegs that looked terrifying for a day or two and then healed. Almost all of them were fiat-backed or properly over-collateralized coins hit by an external shock rather than a design flaw.

The most instructive is USDC's March 2023 break. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, Circle disclosed that $3.3 billion of USDC's cash reserves — about 8% of its backing — was trapped at the bank. Panic redemptions drove USDC to $0.87 in the early hours of March 11, 2023. But the backing was real: once U.S. regulators guaranteed all SVB deposits, USDC was fully back at $1 within roughly three days. CoinDesk's coverage captured the timeline. The episode also dragged DAI down to $0.88, because more than half of DAI's collateral at the time was USDC — a textbook contagion link that MakerDAO later moved to reduce.

Even Tether (USDT), the perennial target of reserve doubts, has wobbled and recovered every time. Its worst liquid-venue print was around $0.95 during the May 2022 UST contagion, when Tether processed an estimated $17 billion-plus in redemptions without ever halting. It saw a similar ~$0.92 dip back in October 2018. Each time it returned to par.

A few crypto-collateralized coins join the recovery column. Tron's USDD dipped to about $0.93 in June 2022 before its reserve pledged up to $2 billion to defend the peg. And Acala's aUSD suffered a freak exploit in August 2022 — a misconfigured liquidity pool let users mint 1.29 billion aUSD out of thin air, crashing it to about $0.009. Acala froze the network, the community voted to burn the erroneous tokens, and the peg climbed back toward $1. Even Fei Protocol (FEI), which launched in April 2021 with $1.3 billion raised and immediately sank to $0.71 when its "reweight" incentive backfired, clawed back to $1 by early May — though it later wound down for unrelated reasons.

The lesson the recoveries teach is the mirror image of the death spirals: real, liquid reserves are what bring a peg home. A coin redeemable 1:1 for dollars can survive a panic; a coin redeemable only for its own falling token cannot.

The "depeg" that wasn't: BUSD

One event gets miscategorized constantly and deserves a correction. In February 2023, Binance USD (BUSD) — then the third-largest stablecoin at roughly $16 billion — was effectively shut down when the New York regulator ordered issuer Paxos to stop minting new tokens. BUSD wobbled to about $0.995 on the news and recovered within hours.

This was a regulatory wind-down, not a depeg crash. BUSD stayed fully backed and redeemable the entire time; Paxos redeemed $7.9 billion of it in a single month with no market disruption. It is the rare example of a major stablecoin ending gracefully — worth remembering precisely because it is so different from everything else on this list.

The 2025 revival: depegs return

After two quiet years in which USDT and USDC barely flinched, peg breaks came back in 2025 — this time concentrated in newer, more exotic designs.

In April 2025, First Digital USD (FDUSD) slid to about $0.87 after Tron's Justin Sun publicly alleged the issuer was insolvent. First Digital denied it and redeemed about $26 million on demand, and the peg recovered — a reminder that for fiat-backed coins, confidence is the whole game. The same month, Synthetix's sUSD fell to roughly $0.68 after a governance change (SIP-420) removed a collateral backstop; it stabilized but traded under peg for weeks.

The most discussed 2025 event was Ethena's USDe, a "synthetic dollar" that holds its peg with a delta-neutral hedge rather than cash. During the massive ~$19 billion liquidation cascade of October 10–11, 2025, USDe printed $0.65 on Binance — but that was a venue-specific oracle distortion. USDe held its peg on other venues, and Ethena disputes that a true depeg occurred. (In the same cascade, Curve's crvUSD briefly traded above peg at $1.02 before self-correcting.) The takeaway: as stablecoin designs get cleverer, the failure modes get subtler — and increasingly, where you trade matters as much as what you hold.

What every depeg has in common — and how to see one coming

Strip away the details and every depeg on this list rhymes. A shock hits, holders rush for the exit at once, and the question becomes purely mechanical: is there enough liquid, trustworthy backing to pay everyone who wants out? If yes, the coin scares and recovers. If no, it spirals.

So the early-warning signs are the same across the board:

1. Backing quality. Cash and short-term Treasuries are robust; another volatile crypto token is not; tokenized real estate you cannot sell in an afternoon is worst of all in a run.
2. Redemption friction. A peg is only as strong as the ability to redeem 1:1, instantly, at scale. USDR died because its liquid reserves ran out; USDC survived because its reserves, though briefly stuck, were genuinely there.
3. Concentration and oracle risk. DAI fell because half its backing was one other coin. USDe "fell" because one exchange's price feed misbehaved. Single points of failure break pegs.
4. Yield that looks too good. Anchor Protocol paid ~20% on UST deposits. Outsized, subsidized yield is often the tell that a stablecoin is buying confidence it cannot fund.

Monitoring all of that across dozens of stablecoins, exchanges, and DeFi pools in real time is exactly the kind of work that doesn't fit on a human screen. It's why SimianX built tooling around it: the Crypto AI Command Room tracks live order-flow, funding, and liquidity stress across major venues, the AI model leaderboard runs 30+ models on real market data so you can see how different engines read the same risk, and autopilots can act on those signals around the clock. We've written before about using AI for early warning of DeFi liquidity and depeg risk and about the stablecoin landscape heading into 2026 — both are useful companions to this reference.

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean when a stablecoin "depegs"?

A stablecoin is designed to track a fixed value, almost always $1. A depeg is any meaningful, sustained deviation from that target — a slip to $0.97 is a minor depeg; a collapse to $0.10 is a catastrophic one. Brief, tiny deviations of a fraction of a cent happen constantly and are normal market noise.

Which stablecoin depeg was the worst?

TerraUSD (UST) in May 2022, by a wide margin. It erased roughly $40 billion of value between UST and its sister token LUNA, triggered an estimated $400 billion in broader crypto losses, and never recovered. It remains the canonical example of why purely algorithmic stablecoins are fragile.

Has USDC or USDT ever permanently depegged?

No. Both have wobbled — USDC to $0.87 during the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank crisis, USDT to about $0.95 during the 2022 Terra contagion — but both returned to $1 within days each time, because both are backed by real, redeemable reserves.

Are algorithmic stablecoins safer now?

Some newer designs (delta-neutral synthetics like USDe, over-collateralized models) are more robust than UST's pure seigniorage approach, but the 2025 peg breaks show the category still carries elevated risk. The historical rule holds: the less hard, liquid backing a stablecoin has, the more dangerous it is in a panic.

How can I monitor stablecoin and DeFi risk in real time?

Watch backing quality, redemption capacity, collateral concentration, and unsustainable yields. Automated tools help — SimianX's AI command room and model leaderboard surface liquidity and funding stress across venues continuously, which is where most depegs first show up.

This reference compiles consensus spot prices from major data providers (CoinDesk, CoinGecko, Chainalysis, and issuer disclosures); illiquid single-exchange prints are excluded. Figures for value-at-risk reflect peak-to-trough estimates and issuer statements at the time of each event. Nothing here is financial advice — stablecoin risk is real, and reserves can change after publication.