Fintech Lab
Incident 15 decision steps
USDC depeg, March 2023
Silicon Valley Bank failed on a Friday. $3.3B of USDC reserves were stuck inside it. You have 60 hours to defend the peg.

You're a treasury engineer at Circle on Friday March 10 2023. Federal regulators have just shut down Silicon Valley Bank, the second-largest bank failure in US history. Circle is one of SVB's largest depositors. The USDC stablecoin promises 1:1 backing by reserves, and $3.3B of those reserves are now frozen inside SVB while the FDIC sorts out depositor claims. Crypto Twitter has not noticed yet, but they will by morning. The team has the weekend before US markets open Monday to verify exposure, communicate, process redemptions from non-SVB reserves, and shore up confidence that USDC will hold its peg. Every choice you make here actually happened. Some were right calls. Some were rushed.

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