Ethena’s USDe stablecoin briefly dropped about 8% to $0.9202 against Tether’s USDT on Binance’s spot market early Tuesday before recovering to $0.9996 within minutes, reigniting memories of a more serious October 2025 depeg event on the same exchange.
The slide occurred between 05:00 and 05:04 UTC, just before a scheduled Binance infrastructure wallet upgrade that suspended deposits and withdrawals for about an hour from 6 a.m. UTC. Spot and futures trading remained open, and there was no indication the maintenance caused the price wobble.
Analysts pointed to thin exchange liquidity rather than any issue with Ethena’s collateral. Trader Punk (@punk2898) estimated that a market sell order of roughly $8 million hit a shallow order book, briefly moving the USDE/USDT pair and allowing the other side to pocket about $600,000 in three minutes. Trader CM (@chenmo) made a similar point, noting that the same thin-book risk contributed to the October 2025 incident.
The October 2025 event was far more severe: USDe fell as low as $0.65 amid a market-wide liquidation that wiped out more than $19 billion in positions held by 1.6 million traders. Binance blamed part of the chaos on a display glitch and later compensated impacted users with about $283 million. Ethena Labs CEO Guy Young said at the time it was “not accurate to describe this as a USDe depeg when a single venue was out of line with the deepest pools of liquidity.” Binance subsequently said it would fold asset redemption prices into its reference index and add a soft price floor for USDe.
Since then, USDe’s utility has expanded beyond DeFi: BlackRock added the token to its Aladdin platform in June, joining BTC and ETH products as the only crypto assets available to Aladdin’s institutional users.
