What is a depeg?
A depeg is any sustained deviation of a stablecoin's market price from its $1.00 target, typically flagged once the deviation exceeds a threshold like 0.5-1% for more than a few minutes. Most depegs are shallow and resolve within hours; the rare deep ones — UST's collapse to near $0 in May 2022 being the extreme case — never recover.
How deviation is actually measured
Trackers typically pull prices from multiple exchanges and DeFi pools and compute a volume-weighted deviation from $1.00. A brief, single-venue wobble caused by a thin order book is noise; a deviation that holds across major venues and persists for hours is signal. This site's live tracker applies exactly that filter rather than flagging every one-second wick.
Shallow vs deep depegs
A shallow depeg — a few tenths of a percent to low single digits — usually reflects temporary supply/demand imbalance on a specific venue and closes as arbitrageurs step in. USDC's fall to about $0.88 in March 2023 was deep by fiat-backed-token standards but still recovered because the underlying assets were sound. A depeg is only proven terminal in hindsight, when supply keeps shrinking and price never returns.
Reading a depeg as it happens
The signals worth tracking live, in order of importance, are: whether redemptions are still processing at par for verified users, whether circulating supply is falling (redemptions working) or flat (redemptions gated or broken), and whether liquidity is being added or withdrawn from on-chain pools. Price alone, without these context signals, tells you very little in the first few hours of an event.
Frequently asked
- What deviation counts as an official depeg?
- There's no single universal threshold, but trackers commonly flag sustained deviations beyond roughly 0.5-1% from $1.00 lasting more than a few minutes across multiple venues.
- Do all depegs mean the stablecoin failed?
- No. Most depegs are shallow and temporary — including USDC's 2023 dip to $0.88, which fully recovered within days.
- What was the worst depeg in history?
- TerraUSD (UST) is the largest, collapsing from $1.00 toward near-zero in May 2022 in an uncollateralised algorithmic design that could not be defended once confidence broke.
- Where can I see historical depegs?
- The permanent archive at /depegs/history logs major depeg events with dates, depth and recovery outcomes.