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Crashed Stablecoin Iron Bank Euro (ibEUR) Lacks Fast Repeg Path

The not-so-stablecoin fell in value Monday after a single trader pulled much of the USDC that kept its Curve pool balanced.

Updated Mar 8, 2024, 6:56 p.m. Published Dec 19, 2023, 5:42 p.m.
CDCROP: Car crash narrow road wedged (Unsplash)
CDCROP: Car crash narrow road wedged (Unsplash)

Iron Bank Euro (ibEUR) has no immediate path back to its stablecoin peg after falling as much as 60% in value early Monday, according to public statements from people close to the project.

The minor alternative stablecoin, which has an issuance of $3.7 million, dropped from its normal price of $0.97 to as low as $0.39 Monday after a shakeup in ibEUR's main trading pool left the asset's markets imbalanced. At press time ibEUR had recovered to $0.72 after risk-prone traders piled in, hoping for a path back to – or at least closer to – its supposed Euro peg.

But there's no guarantee ibEUR will quickly return to its previous price level. The protocol supporting it "is not taking any peg maintenance" at the moment and lacks the treasury liquidity necessary to stabilize the asset, said the pseudonymous admin of the Keep3r Network Telegram chat, which is associated with the project.

"Keep3r treasury has the option to trade liquid assets for ibEUR at discount, and pay down some of their own outstanding borrows with Iron Bank at the discretion of the keep3r multisig," the pseudonymous Funk said in a message to CoinDesk.

"Alternatively the ibEUR/USDC pool is a curve V2 pool, which will automatically repeg towards target price over time," they said.

The depeg occurred after a single trader withdrew nearly $900,000 in USDC liquidity from the Curve pool that supports most trading in ibEUR. That pool was slightly weighted toward ibEUR at press time, meaning it now lacks sufficient USDC liquidity to keep trading in line.

"In terms of ibEUR/USDC pool, we have to just wait and let curve pool do it's thing [sic]," said the pseudonymous chat admin, known as Funk, in the Keep3r chat.

"It'd also help if the Iron Bank team stopped their credit borrowing contract, This has 2.5m ibEUR borrowed and appears to be farming single sided on the pools, which is dumb af," Funk said in the chat.

Funk did not return a request for comment.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

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