なぜUSDeは10月の暴落を生き延びたのか、LUNAは灰に燃え尽きたのか：市場のストレステスト

The October 2025 Flash Crash: When Stablecoins Meet Reality

October 11 was brutal. BTC tanked from $117k to $105.9k (13.2% single day), ETH dropped 16%, and the market saw $19.358 billion in liquidations — a historic record. But here’s the twist: while the crypto world was melting down, USDe briefly hit $0.65 (down 34% from peg) but recovered to $0.98 within 24 hours. Compare that to LUNA-UST in 2022: it just… died.

The difference? Real assets vs. empty promises.

The Collateral Stack That Actually Held

USDe’s backing is straightforward:

• 60%+ in BTC and ETH (assets the market chose, not bureaucrats)
• Liquid staking derivatives (WBETH, BNSOL) — the market’s own efficiency plays
• 10% USDT/USDC as a shock absorber
• Collateral ratio: still 120%+ during the crash, with $66M excess reserves

At peak panic, Uniswap’s USDe-USDT pool shrunk to $3.2M (down 89%), causing 100k USDe sales to get hit with 25% slippage. But critically: users could still redeem actual crypto at any time. That trust signal was everything.

LUNA-UST had nothing. UST’s value was just “we promise LUNA won’t crash” — except it did, and boom, you get zero.

How the Hedge Actually Worked (And Almost Didn’t)

USDe uses derivatives shorts to offset collateral moves — when ETH price falls, short profits compensate. When it rises, spot gains offset short losses. No centralized bailout needed; the market does the work.

The kicker: During the Oct crash, when ETH dropped 16%, these hedges almost failed due to liquidity gaps (one CEX paused perpetual trading). But Ethena Labs’ short positions ultimately generated $120M in floating gains — not from admin subsidies, but from voluntary long-short trading.

LUNA Foundation’s Bitcoin reserve sale in 2022? Useless. You can’t fight spontaneous market panic by dumping BTC into a falling market. The reserves were just more dominoes.

The Real Question: Can Non-State Money Actually Work?

This event echoes Hayek’s 1976 thesis: privately issued money, if it loses the market’s trust, dies. The government monopoly on currency obscures bad design with bailouts. USDe has no bailout option — it survives only if the market believes in its mechanism.

USDe survived because:

1. Transparent mechanics — proof of collateral, real-time liquidation
2. Redeemability — your crypto isn’t locked; you can pull it out
3. Market-driven adjustments — post-crash, they optimized collateral ratios without top-down orders

LUNA-UST failed because:

1. Value from hype — no real assets to redeem into
2. Unsustainable yields — Anchor’s 20% APY relied on continuous subsidies, not real demand
3. Centralized rescue theater — Luna Foundation Guard tried and failed

The Cracks Still Show: Concentration Risk

But USDe isn’t perfect. The collateral stack is 80% crypto assets — all bound to the same market cycle. When crypto crashes 16%, hedges can’t fully decouple fast enough. October’s liquidity hole exposed that.

Plus: 70% of short hedges are on just 2 CEXs. If those platforms’ perpetual markets freeze again, the whole strategy hiccups. USDe currently relies only on perpetual contracts for hedging — no options, no futures diversification.

The RWA Upgrade: Breaking Out of the Crypto Bubble

The answer? Real-world assets. USDe integrating RWA tokens (gold, US Treasury bonds, stock tokens) would:

• Reduce crypto collateral from 80% to 40-50%
• Add a cross-domain buffer (gold-to-ETH correlation = 0.2, perfect hedge)
• Access traditional finance hedging tools (stock options, London gold forwards)

BlackRock’s BUIDL already proved this works — but BUIDL is centralized. USDe can do it decentralized, with smart contracts handling valuation and verification.

The RWA market is hitting $26.4B in 2025 (113% annual growth). USDe isn’t reinventing the wheel; it’s connecting to a real economic cycle beyond crypto.

The Bigger Picture: Hayek Was Right

Non-state money doesn’t fail from one crash — it fails from losing trust or showing it can’t adapt. LUNA-UST couldn’t adapt; it just imploded. USDe adapted in real-time: optimized leverage caps, rebalanced collateral, proved transparency.

This is the evolution Hayek predicted: currencies that can’t self-correct lose the market competition. USDe is still in round one, but it’s playing the game right.

The Takeaway

October 2025 was USDe’s stress test — and it passed. Not perfectly, but it passed in ways LUNA never could. If the RWA upgrade happens, USDe stops being a “crypto experiment” and becomes something harder to dismiss: a real cross-market value carrier.

The real question now: Will regulatory or technical friction kill it before it gets there?