On October 10, one dollar traded at 65 cents. The same dollar also traded at 99 cents. Both prices were real — only one of them cost people money.
The 10/10 Files, part 4 — the depeg that wasn't.
Between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC, USDe printed as low as $0.65 on Binance. On Curve and Uniswap, it sat near $0.99 the whole 40 minutes. The stablecoin never broke. The price feed did.
Binance's internal oracle reads its own spot orderbook instead of the outside market. When the tariff sell-off drained the book, the engine believed $0.65 and liquidated accordingly — futures, margin and loan users holding USDe, BNSOL and WBETH as collateral, all marked to a price that existed on one exchange and nowhere else.
The irony: Ethena's protocol passed the exact test it was built for. Roughly $2 billion of USDe redeemed in 24 hours, minimal deviation. The peg held where the money could actually move.
Binance didn't hide. Yi He: "When we fall short, we take responsibility, there are no excuses or justifications." $283 million in compensation, two batches, paid within 24 hours.
The lesson this series keeps landing on: you can be right about the asset and still get killed by the plumbing. Your collateral isn't priced at what the market says — it's priced at whatever number the liquidation engine is reading.
Today USDe is back at $1.00. ENA bled another 19% last week to $0.19 — 87% below its ATH — on $8.2M in long liquidations; today it's up 10% on the day. The tape is re-pricing what the venue got wrong.
When did you last check which price feed your exchange liquidates you against?
$ENA $USDE
The 10/10 Files, part 4 — the depeg that wasn't.
Between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC, USDe printed as low as $0.65 on Binance. On Curve and Uniswap, it sat near $0.99 the whole 40 minutes. The stablecoin never broke. The price feed did.
Binance's internal oracle reads its own spot orderbook instead of the outside market. When the tariff sell-off drained the book, the engine believed $0.65 and liquidated accordingly — futures, margin and loan users holding USDe, BNSOL and WBETH as collateral, all marked to a price that existed on one exchange and nowhere else.
The irony: Ethena's protocol passed the exact test it was built for. Roughly $2 billion of USDe redeemed in 24 hours, minimal deviation. The peg held where the money could actually move.
Binance didn't hide. Yi He: "When we fall short, we take responsibility, there are no excuses or justifications." $283 million in compensation, two batches, paid within 24 hours.
The lesson this series keeps landing on: you can be right about the asset and still get killed by the plumbing. Your collateral isn't priced at what the market says — it's priced at whatever number the liquidation engine is reading.
Today USDe is back at $1.00. ENA bled another 19% last week to $0.19 — 87% below its ATH — on $8.2M in long liquidations; today it's up 10% on the day. The tape is re-pricing what the venue got wrong.
When did you last check which price feed your exchange liquidates you against?
$ENA $USDE