USDe scare returns as stablecoin drops nearly 10% from $1 peg on Binance

Ethena’s USDe stablecoin endured a brief 8% drop to $0.9202 against Tether’s USDT on Binance’s spot market early on Tuesday, an episode that quickly brought back memories of the October 2025 episode when the synthetic dollar lost its dollar peg on the same platform. 

As of this report, USDe had recovered to $0.9996, limiting the slide to a matter of minutes.

The September 2026 USDe slide landed shortly before Binance initiated a scheduled infrastructure wallet upgrade where the exchange suspended deposits and withdrawals across all networks for about an hour starting at 6 a.m. UTC, while spot and futures trading stayed open. 

Notably, nothing suggests that the USDe price slide had anything to do with the scheduled maintenance.

Did USDe suffer another depeg? 

Analysts monitoring USDe’s price against USDT on Binance’s spot market flagged a brief wobble in the USDE/USDT pair between 05:00 UTC and 05:04 UTC, with price falling as low as $0.9202. 

The stablecoin quickly bounced back near its $1 target within minutes of an 8% slide that only showed up on Binance’s order book. Price did not move abnormally on-chain or across deeper liquidity pools. 

USDe is the synthetic dollar issued by Ethena, which holds its $1 peg by pairing crypto collateral with short futures positions instead of the cash reserves that typical stablecoins such as USDT and USDC hold. 

Why did USDe lose its dollar peg again? 

Different on-chain analysts have varying theories about the mechanics behind the red wick on the USDE/USDT chart on Binance. However, many point to thin exchange liquidity rather than a problem with Ethena’s collateral. 

One explanation offered by one of the first traders to spot the slide, Punk (@punk2898), was that a market sell order of roughly $8 million in USDe hit a shallow order book, causing the drop to show up on the charts before other traders absorbed the position. 

Punk suggested that someone on the other side pocketed about $600,000 in three minutes, and he called on Binance to warn users before such large market orders execute.

Another trader monitoring the situation, CM (@chenmo), made the same point about Binance’s thin USDe book. That combination, according to CM, is where the risk started spreading during Binance’s October incident.

This is not the same as the October 2025 crash

Today’s slide quickly brought back memories of the October 2025 depeg to as low as $0.65 on Binance. That episode occurred in the middle of a market-wide liquidation event that Cryptopolitan reported wiped out more than $19 billion in positions held by 1.6 million traders in a day. 

Binance blamed part of the chaos on a display glitch that showed some tokens at $0 and compensated impacted users with about $283 million.

Ethena Labs CEO Guy Young went on X at the time to ensure the “depeg” narrative did not stick, writing that 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 responded by pledging to fold asset redemption prices into its reference index and add a soft price floor for USDe. CM also noted that Binance added the stablecoin’s actual redemption price to its reference index rather than reading order-book quotes alone, which in theory should stop a repeat of that episode.

A repeat of the October 2025 incident would have further-reaching effects now that the stablecoin’s utility has spread 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.

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