Why Stablecoins Keep Failing: Risks Every User Should Know

The sudden pivot by regulators towards a pro-stablecoin position has caught many off guard. These unique digital assets have become crucial in driving the adoption of digital assets amongst new users. However, their technology, although promising, doesn’t always deliver. Here’s a glimpse into stablecoins, their history, and why they may not be as stable as promised.

Benefits of Stablecoins

There are obvious benefits that stablecoins bring to the market. For one, they combine the transparency and efficiency of blockchain assets with the convenience of working with fiat values. As such, businesses can utilize these assets to make fast payments across borders with minimal fees.

Additionally, stablecoins provide reduced settlement risks and can be used to secure additional rewards via DeFi (Decentralized Finance) platforms. Notably, this latter capability has been part of a recent debate between bankers and CEXs (Centralized Exchanges) like Coinbase, who believe that staking stablecoins should be allowed.

How Stablecoins Maintain Their Pegs

The concept of a stablecoin seems simple on paper – back a digital asset with some form of reserves. However, in practice, this strategy has proven to be much more difficult than expected. Part of the difficulty comes from the many different ways in which stablecoin issuers can choose to back their projects. Some popular formats include:

Fiat Reserves

The most popular style of stablecoin is fiat-backed options. These tokens rely on fiat reserves held in an equivalent amount to back their project. This strategy provides the most liquidity and stability, but is still not without many concerns and failures in the past.

Fiat reserve-backed stablecoins require constant auditing to ensure that their issuance doesn’t exceed the value of the reserves. In the past, popular projects like Tether (USDT) have come under scrutiny for initially claiming 1:1 backing by fiat currency and then altering their backing to include paper assets.

Today, fiat-based stablecoins must have 100% fiat reserves. This requirement provides these projects with the ability to instantly adjust to market conditions, enabling the token to regain its 1:1 peg, even during intense market volatility. Despite all of these requirements, greed is still the biggest threat to these projects.

Consequently, fiat-backed stablecoins require constant auditing. This auditing process needs to include an unrelated and reputable third-party auditing firm to ensure that the reserves are as stated. History has shown that when projects relied on internal audits, it led to a loss of faith in their reserves.

Commodity-Backed Stablecoins

Commodity-based stablecoins operate similarly to fiat-backed projects, with the only difference being that they rely on commodities like gold and silver. These projects have lost momentum recently, but had been a major part of the stablecoin market before the surge in fiat-backed platforms.

One of the main reasons these projects appeal to investors is that they combine the stability of commodities like gold with their appreciation. Gold has been shown to rise in value over time and especially during times of economic uncertainty. Using it as a reserve for stablecoins enables these projects to utilize fewer reserves over time to issue more tokens.

However, there are many inherent problems with this approach. For one, many of these projects don’t rely solely on commodities held in reserves as their backing asset. Instead, they included the entire mining operations and other related assets as part of the token’s reserves.

This structure makes it impossible to truly gauge the value of the reserves, which led to most of these projects failing due to a lack of user trust. However, some projects like PaxGold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) have instituted a fiat-backed type model in which their reserves are held in third-party audited vaults.

Algorithmic

Algorithmic stablecoins rely on equations and cryptocurrency reserves to remain stable. They integrate reserves that can automatically increase and decrease their holdings when needed to keep the stablecoin buffered from volatility. This type of stablecoin was among the first to hit the market.

The main advantages of algorithmic stablecoins are that they can be trustless. These networks utilize blockchain assets as reserves, meaning that everyone in the network can see exactly how much is in the reserves without the need to utilize third-party auditing services.

The first algorithmic stablecoins utilized Bitcoin reserves to battle volatility, which proved to be nearly impossible. The main issue would always be that Bitcoin volatility meant that the reserves could suddenly drop in value, and it would be impossible to acquire enough Bitcoin to retain it if the loss was steep enough.

Developers didn’t give up, and the next generation projects integrated their own tokens as reserves. This strategy caused even more issues as these tokens lacked the consumer trust that Bitcoin has built up over +16 years of value-building and use.

Stablecoin Risks

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History has shown that stablecoins can work, but there are many risks that must be taken into consideration to prevent catastrophic failure and major losses. Factors like bad auditing, marketability, centralized control, banking issues, and exchange mishaps can lead to token holders losing funds. Here are some of the most recent hard lessons that have been learned by the crypto community regarding stablecoins.

The Terra UST Collapse: Lessons Learned

The Terra LUNA UST crash was a wake-up call for stablecoin users. This incident occurred in May 2022 due to a perfect storm of factors. Terra promised to be a high-performance, all-inclusive 4th-generation blockchain ecosystem. It integrated a DeFi-capable programmable blockchain, a versatile utility token called LUNA, and a new stablecoin dubbed UST.

Terra’s design linked UST and LUNA inside a reflexive mint-and-burn mechanism intended to stabilize its price. On paper, this strategy made sense as the developers could always provide enough tokens to meet the reserve requirements if needed. Additionally, UST holders could burn UST to mint $1 in LUNA or vice versa if required to help maintain the peg.

However, everything came crashing down when the project was unable to keep UST pegged to $1 due to its value dropping. This inability to remain pegged was immediately noticed by LUNA token holders. Many took it as a sign to sell their assets before it was too late. This situation led to a LUNA sell-off.

DeFi Sell-Offs

At the time of the crash, the Anchor Protocol held a large portion of the circulating supply. This DeFi staking protocol had offered UST holders as much as 20% for participating in their pools. However, when the project realized that UST couldn’t hold its peg, it began to sell off its holdings, prompting others to follow suit.

In a desperate attempt to keep UST stable, the developer issued additional LUNA. This maneuver worsened the situation as higher inflation drove the value of LUNA to mere fractions of its initial price. In total, LUNA lost $40B in value in less than 24 hours.

Why USDC Temporarily Lost Its Peg in 2023

Sometimes stablecoins can lose their stability for reasons outside of their control, including issues in the traditional banking system. The USDC incident that occurred on March 10, 2023, is a perfect example of why intertwining traditional and digital finance isn’t always beneficial.

This collapse was triggered by a sudden failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). A combination of bad investing and management led to a sudden run on SVB. Specifically, the bank invested heavily in long-term bonds, expecting inflation to be lower. Instead, inflation increased, causing the company’s assets, like long-duration mortgage-backed securities, to lose over $1B in value. This news led to a bank run on SVB, causing it to stop withdrawals.

At the same time as the incident, Circle, USDC’s issuer, announced that it held around $3.3B in reserves with SVB and was unable to access the funding. This news hit like a brick, causing a sudden sell-off of USDC across the entire DeFi sector. Platforms like Curve and Aave saw a sudden rush of users seeking to offload their USDC.

How Bank Failures Affect Stablecoin Reserves

The sudden rush of traders, combined with an inability to access its reserves, caused USDC to dip to $0.87. It also led to traders converting their assets to other stablecoins, mainly USDT. As all hope looked to be gone for the project, the US government intervened on behalf of the bankers.

The government saw that the SVB collapse was spreading to other organizations and decided they needed to bail them out to prevent a major system failure. Federal regulators launched a backstop facility with up to $250B available, ensuring banks like SVB could guarantee deposits and preventing further contagion into stablecoin markets. By extension, this bailout also saved many fiat-backed stablecoins.

Keenly, the bailout helped stabilize the U.S. financial markets. It also enabled fiat-backed stablecoins like USDC to regain their peg. To prevent future incidents, the FDIC introduced new protections designed to prevent bank runs. These maneuvers helped to regain consumer confidence, and by March 13, USDC had regained its pegged value.

PYUSD’s $300T Minting Glitch Explained

Another factor to consider when discussing the stability of stablecoins is technical problems. Many of these projects have active developers who are responsible for issuing tokens and more. In the PYUSD incident, a technical error could have ended up costing the project billions.

The incident occurred on October 15, 2025, when stablecoin issuer Paxos made a small issuance error. The project accidentally issued $300T in USD while transferring funds internally. Notably, this wasn’t a security breach. There were no hackers involved.

This mint command error, which was 3x the global GDP at the time, was immediately seen by users who were monitoring the network via blockchain explorers. This sudden minting of trillions in crypto caught the attention of both users and regulators, who were both quick to point out the error.

Luck Was On their Side

Thankfully, the newly minted coins hadn’t been circulated yet, so the developers were able to burn them before they caused any significant losses. The entire process from minting to burning took less than 30 minutes, and there were no losses to users or the network.

Amazingly, PYUSD held its peg to $1 throughout the entire debacle. This stability represented a major milestone in terms of consumer trust in blockchain monitoring technologies. It also demonstrated why blockchain transparency provides a better option than centralized solutions.

The USDe Binance Price Error (2025)

The most recent example of a stablecoin causing havoc would be the USDe/Binance incident that occurred on October 10, 2025. This incident is another example of how third parties can influence the stability of these projects and cause a lot of uncertainty in the market.

In this scenario, the stablecoin USDe did nothing wrong. The problem was a pricing issue on Binance. This price display error caused many tokens to show incorrect values, with some even listing at $0 on the platform. It was later revealed that errors in the decimal placing protocol were to blame.

During the issues, the stablecoin USDe saw its value suddenly drop to $0.66 on the platform, despite the project retaining its peg on all other exchanges. Binance admitted its fault and later compensated users $283M in losses, alongside integrating enhanced safety systems to prevent this incident from occurring again.

Thankfully, the crypto community was able to determine that the issue was only on Binance. Had this information been delayed, it could have resulted in massive sell-offs of the token, essentially dooming it to failure. Following the incident, Ethena Labs, USDe’s issuer, reassured its token holders that its reserves and project remained stable and on course.

Bitcoin May Be the Best Option

As more companies and users turn towards stablecoins as a viable way to make international payments, it’s wise to take a second and compare these assets to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, which needs no reserves to hold its value, stablecoins rely on complex algorithms or accounting to ensure their stability. Sadly, each added step creates a new failure point. Consequently, many have pivoted back to Bitcoin as their premier digital asset payment option.

Stablecoins aren’t Stable | Conclusion

You can see from these examples that stablecoins have come a long way, but are far from perfect. Perhaps in the future, as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin continue to gain value, these projects will find a way to ensure their stability even during extreme volatility or errors. For now, there are still a lot of scenarios in which Bitcoin is a smarter option.

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