Historical replay · USDC/USD
USDC's Depeg During the SVB Collapse (March 2023)
On March 11, 2023, the USDC stablecoin — designed to always be worth exactly $1.00 — crashed to $0.88 after Circle disclosed $3.3 billion in reserves stuck at the failed Silicon Valley Bank. Relive the weekend that shook the entire stablecoin sector.
On March 10, 2023, California regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in the largest US bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, disclosed that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion in dollar reserves was held at SVB itself — real money, but temporarily inaccessible while federal regulators decided the failed bank's fate.
Within the window replayed here, USDC crashed from its stable $1.00 value to a low of $0.882 — an 11.8% drop for an asset whose entire purpose is to never move — as traders sold in bulk, fearing the reserves might be unrecoverable. The price began recovering within hours, as signs emerged that US authorities would guarantee all of SVB's deposits, Circle's included.
By March 13, after the US Treasury formally confirmed the deposit guarantee, USDC had returned almost exactly to $1.00. The episode became a case study in a crucial distinction within the stablecoin world: a depeg caused by a temporary, solvable reserve issue behaves completely differently from one caused by a fundamentally broken algorithmic mechanism, which typically never recovers.