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DAI is different in that it is collateralized and backed by a diversified portfolio of crypto assets. Instead of being issued by a centralized entity, a decentralized autonomous organization (or “DAO”) called MakerDAO manages DAI. DAI is collateralized with crypto rather than dollars, but it is, and this is critical, overcollateralized.

UST is even more different. It’s not collateralized at all. It is an algorithmic stablecoin powered by the Terra protocol. Instead, it is backed by a crypto token called LUNA. I covered how this works in a previous newsletter writing:

When UST’s price is too high (>$1), the protocol incentivizes users to burn (destroy) LUNA and mint (make) UST. When UST’s price is too low (<$1), the protocol incentivizes users to burn (destroy) UST and mint (make) LUNA.

This is pretty clever on the surface. It’s simple. If the demand for UST is high enough to increase its price to $1.01, the protocol prints some UST in exchange for getting rid of some LUNA. The problem is that it works perfectly until it doesn’t. And boy did it stop working last Monday …

That’s supposed to be $1, not 11 cents. The LUNA chart somehow looks worse.

OK, naturally, you’re thinking that the mechanism broke or something. It didn’t break. It worked as designed and you can see that if you look at the amount of LUNA that has been issued as the protocol tried to algorithmically bring UST back to $1 while LUNA’s price was also tanking.

That’s right. The total supply of LUNA went from about 725 million tokens on May 5 to about 7 trillion on May 13. Meanwhile, LUNA lost 99.9% of its value. This is what hyperinflation looks like.

As mentioned above, Terraform Labs (the company behind Terra) laid out a plan to buy $10 billion of bitcoin and other crypto assets through the LFG in order to act as a backstop in case something like this happened. The problem remained, though. UST wasn’t fully collateralized like the other stablecoins in the top 5. Before the collapse, UST’s market capitalization was $18 billion, way more than the nearly $4 billion the foundation had in reserve.

Whatever happened, we got lucky

Our friends at crypto data provider Kaiko did a great job breaking down what exactly happened. The short of it is this: UST dipped below $1, and all attempts, both by the Terra protocol algorithm and by the lending out of LFG reserves to trading firms, couldn’t bring UST back to $1. Between UST and LUNA, over $40 billion of value was lost.

What exactly happened doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that when something bad happened, Terra couldn’t handle it. What really matters is that an undercollateralized, algorithmic stablecoin will fail no matter how long it succeeds.

The system failed. But if we’re honest, UST was a wild success up until the moment it wasn’t. History should serve as a lesson here, when we inevitably will see a successful UST copycat crop up in 2027 or whatever.

We also are incredibly lucky that UST and LUNA aren’t big or intertwined enough to cause mass hysteria across all markets. I honestly believe we were lucky this happened in 2022 and not in 2030. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine put it well:

Five years from now, if every cryptocurrency goes to zero … well, I don’t know what the next five years will be like, but a plausible story (as of last week anyway!) is that there will be continuing integration of crypto into the real economy. More crypto companies will be big and important and intertwined with other companies; their stock will be in the indexes and they will borrow money from banks and use their own money to finance real businesses. ... Crypto platforms will be used for real economic activity; ordinary people will invest their savings in those platforms, and those investments will be used to finance real, non-crypto business activity.

Spot on. Even if you’re like me, a bitcoin maximalist praying for the day where we go back to just one cryptocurrency, you have to admit that we are going to see more crypto in more industries in the short to medium term. Except next time an undercollateralized, algorithmic stablecoin fails, it’s not going to be $40 billion of lost value. It might be $400 billion. That could be catastrophic. We should look to avoid that scenario at all costs.

What else did we learn from the UST crash?

On the bright side, somehow bitcoin didn’t completely collapse. Over 80,000 BTC from that almost $4 billion treasury was potentially sold (we can’t yet confirm if the bitcoin was actually sold, but it was sent to exchanges) during the mad dash to get UST back to $1. That caused a price reaction, sure, but then again, the broader crypto market sold off because bad things were happening to a big crypto project (LUNA was once the 10th most valuable cryptocurrency). Add on the tenuous macroeconomic environment and general risk-off sentiment in the market, and it feels almost impossible that bitcoin still boasts a market cap of over $500 billion.

I think we are numb to these large numbers given the unprecedented bull market of the last 13 years, and so this bears repeating. Bitcoin was a worthless, purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash created by an unknown person in 2009. No big company or government put marketing, research or legal dollars behind it, and yet it is now a serious macro asset that important politicians and financiers feel the need to comment on.

A serious macro asset that can take huge swathes of selling volume and still … not … go … away. Bitcoin is here to stay. So is crypto. As long as we learn from this, that can be a good thing.

But if history is any indication, we still need to ensure that overconfidence doesn’t get the best of “future us.”