What if a client bug mass-slashes Lido validators and breaks stETH?
A mass Lido validator slash breaking the stETH peg and cascading Aave liquidations is the sharpest DeFi-systemic chain: stETH discount forces leveraged stETH/ETH loops to unwind, ETH gaps -6.5% and BTC follows on contagion. This is a more violent rerun of the June-2022 stETH depeg that helped sink 3AC/Celsius. Because Lido dominates liquid staking, the single-point concentration means the peg break is the actual systemic trigger — watch the stETH/ETH curve, not spot.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A client bug slashes thousands of Lido validators simultaneously, breaking stETH peg and cascading liquidations on Aave. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▼ · Crypto liquidity ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.