A stablecoin can be worth $1.00 and $0.65 at the exact same time depending on which app you open.
April 16, 2026
Original Paper
When the Peg Breaks on One Exchange: Venue-Isolated Stablecoin Depegs and the Oracle Feedback Loop
SSRN · 6574205
The Takeaway
We think 'stablecoins' have a single market price, but a software loop recently proved that price is an illusion. On Binance, a major stablecoin crashed to $0.65 while staying at $0.99 everywhere else, simply because the exchange's pricing 'oracle' got stuck in a feedback loop with its own trades. This glitch caused billions in losses even though the asset was technically solvent and backed by real money. It’s a wake-up call that in crypto, the 'price' isn't a reflection of global value, but a reflection of whatever your specific exchange's code thinks is happening. This means you can lose everything in a crash that isn't even actually happening on other platforms.
From the abstract
On October 10, 2025, the largest forced deleveraging event in cryptocurrency history triggered over$19 billion in liquidations across centralized and decentralized venues. During the cascade, Ethena’ssynthetic dollar USDe dropped to $0.65 on Binance—a 35% depeg—while simultaneously tradingnear $0.99 on decentralized venues such as Curve and Uniswap. Using 1-minute candle data fromBinance’s public API (4,321 candles across the event window), we document that this was not aglobal stablecoin failur