ethereum has a version of this, and the part everyone watches is the part that moves last.
ethereum is a network with its own money, called ether. if you own ether you can lock it up to help run the network and earn a small return, which is called staking. once it's locked you can't simply take it back. there's a waiting line to get out, called the exit queue, and when a lot of people leave at once it can take days. that queue is what people point at when they want to know whether a panic is happening.
i think the queue is the last place a panic shows up.
most people don't lock up their own ether. they hand it to a service that does it for them and gives back a receipt token, something like steth, which is supposed to be worth one ether. those receipts trade on the open market all day long. so when fear arrives, the receipt gets sold off cheap within minutes, while the queue itself hasn't moved an inch.
the second layer goes next. those receipts sit inside lending apps as collateral, meaning they were pledged against loans on the assumption they stay worth one ether each. once a receipt trades at ninety five cents on the dollar, those loans start unwinding on their own, inside the same hour.
only after all of that does anyone actually get in line.
the honest counterargument is that none of this touches the network. blocks keep getting produced, the chain keeps settling, and a discounted receipt is a market event rather than a broken protocol. that's fair, and it's the strongest version of the other side.
what would show me wrong: receipts trading at a real discount more than once, with the queue staying calm and the lending markets absorbing it without forced selling.
bitcoin doesn't carry this stack. your coin isn't a receipt that somebody else issues, and there's no line to stand in when you want to move it. the price can still fall just as hard. you just find that out from the price itself, instead of from a lending app deciding overnight what your receipt is worth.
