At four in the morning, the cold light from the screen cut through the darkness of the room. I stared at the BTC/USD candlestick chart, the price level of 88500 like a golden line, slightly trembling in the silence of the early morning. Suddenly, my phone screen exploded with a series of messages—FDUSD has decoupled.

"Impossible…" I muttered as I clicked on the news. FDUSD, one of the three major stablecoins in the crypto world, was reported to have a reserve loophole last night, causing its peg rate to plummet to 0.8726. The BTC/FDUSD trading pair on the exchange instantly turned into a slaughterhouse, with countless leveraged positions being forcibly liquidated, bloodied sell orders smashing through support levels.

"Bang!"

The BTC price plummeted vertically from 88500, like a sharp knife stabbing into the heart, watching as the margin ratio of my 20x leveraged long position dropped from 120% to 45% in an instant. The community exploded, messages on T group rolling in frantically: "Run! They are about to pull the plug!" "BTC is crashing too, it’s all over!"

My phone suddenly vibrated, it was Ajie— the brother who mortgaged his house to go all in on Bitcoin last month. "Forced liquidation… it’s all gone…" His voice sounded like it was surfacing from an abyss, a loud crash of glass echoed from the other end of the line. I opened my mouth, but heard my own alarm screeching: position triggered for forced liquidation.

82000.

In just 23 minutes, BTC was bleeding profusely. I slumped in my chair, watching helplessly as three years of savings turned into a tombstone line on the candlestick chart. A notification popped up in the bottom right corner: total liquidations across the network reached 1.19 billion dollars, 300,000 accounts went to zero. The community fell silent for a moment, then someone uploaded a video: the rooftop of an exchange was crowded with people, a shadow leaped down.

"It’s all FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), it will go back up when the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates!" I trembled as I typed this line.

As the first rays of morning light streamed in through the window, BTC struggled to crawl back to 83000. I stared at that faintly rebounding candlestick, vaguely recalling the flash crash in March 2024, but this time was different. The collapse of FDUSD tore open the deepest wounds in the crypto world—when even pegged stablecoins become scythes, what exactly are we trading?

Suddenly, a message popped up from Binance: "FDUSD audit report confirms 1:1 full reserve support." FDUSD surged to 0.9878 in response, but BTC was still being dragged down towards 83000. I forced a smile as I shut down the computer, a drop of warm water stained the keyboard.

There is no dawn in the crypto world, only stop-loss orders flickering in the eternal night, like an unclaimed funeral.

Sun🈹, make🈳, give me my money back.