About USDC depeg

The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 was a significant risk event for USDC issuer Circle Internet Financial, which had $3.3 billion in assets tied up in the bank. Over the span of three days, Circle cleared roughly $3 billion in USDC redemptions as the value of its stablecoin plunged to a low of around $0.87. link

Trading

Not surprisingly, the day of the depeg was one of the highest volume days for DEXs ever. Swaps between USDT, USDC, and DAI exceeded $10bn on Curve and Uniswap V3 combined, with Curve taking a slight edge in volume at just under $6bn.

Curve maintained its lead on March 12; Uniswap V3 took top spot on March 13, with $1.5bn in volume to $1.3bn. Uniswap V2’s stablecoin-stablecoin volume also surged, though it reached just $40mn on March 11.

This flurry of activity created plentiful opportunities for arbitrage. Zooming in on the hours leading up to USDC’s depeg, Curve and Uniswap V3’s USDC-USDT price follows the same general trend with some differences. link

WHAT IS GAS?

Gas refers to the unit that measures the amount of computational effort required to execute specific operations on the Ethereum network.

• Since each Ethereum transaction requires computational resources to execute, each transaction requires a fee. Gas refers to the fee required to execute a transaction on Ethereum, regardless of transaction success or failure.

• Gas fees are paid in Ethereum's native currency, ether (ETH). Gas prices are denoted in gwei, which itself is a denomination of ETH - each gwei is equal to 0.000000001 ETH (10-9 ETH). For example, instead of saying that your gas costs 0.000000001 ether, you can say your gas costs 1 gwei. The word 'gwei' itself means 'giga-wei', and it is equal to 1,000,000,000 wei. Wei itself (named after Wei Dai, creator of b-money) is the smallest unit of ETH