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A “peg” is a promise. An asset is pegged to a target — $1, the SOL it represents, or the NAV of an underlying fund — because there is some mechanism that lets a holder redeem the asset for that target value, or arbitrage the price back when it drifts. Peg risk is the gap between the promise and the redemption path actually working.

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Why pegs break

In every depeg event we’ve documented, the cause is one of three things:
  1. The redemption mechanism failed. USDC during the SVB weekend (the bank holding the reserves was in receivership). UST in May 2022 (the mint/burn flywheel went reflexive). Any LST whose stake pool pauses redemptions.
  2. The market priced doubt faster than redemption could catch up. mSOL in June 2022 — Marinade’s on-chain redemption never moved, but a thin DEX pool printed a panic price for four minutes and an oracle ingested it.
  3. The mechanism was always asymmetric. Aave’s GHO at launch (mint cap, no PSM) floated below par for 8 months because arbitrage could only push the price down.
The first kind is the one most monitors are designed for. The second and third hurt more, because they look like normal market noise until they don’t.

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Seven asset classes, seven peg shapes

Pegana tracks 63 active assets across all seven peg shapes below (assets.toml keys in parentheses) — FX-pegged is live too (EURC, monitoring_only). Each shape has a different way of breaking. See LST peg drift for a deep read on the SOL-pegged LST case, and yield-bearing NAV oracles for the yield-bearing case.

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”Depeg” isn’t binary

A USDC trading at 0.998hasasmalltemporaryspreaddrivenbyaCurvepoolimbalance—notadepeg.USDCtradingat0.998 has a small temporary spread driven by a Curve pool imbalance — not a depeg. USDC trading at 0.87 over a weekend, with intrinsic at $1.00 and no redemption path until Monday — that’s a depeg. The difference is state and persistence. Pegana resolves this with a 5-state FSM (PEGGED / DRIFT / DEPEG / CRITICAL / BLACK_SWAN), hysteresis dwell timers (30s entry, 120s exit), and per-asset thresholds calibrated to each asset’s noise profile. A 30 bps spread is DRIFT on jitoSOL and noise on INF. See state machine for the FSM, and hysteresis FSM for why entry and exit thresholds differ.

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What Pegana is not

  • Not a stop-loss oracle. We publish state, not “sell now” signals.
  • Not a single-source liquidation feed. Cross-check with Pyth/Switchboard for liquidation pricing. See honesty about limits.
  • Not a price oracle. For “fair price,” use Pyth or Switchboard. We are a state oracle — the question we answer is “is this asset still doing what it promises.”

Intrinsic vs market

The two-numbers framing every Pegana signal is built on.

State machine

The five states, transitions, and what each state means.

LST peg drift

Why LSTs drift differently from stables, and what the signal looks like.

Case studies

Five real depegs analyzed end-to-end.