DeFi’s Rite of Passage: From FOMO to FUD?
We were all alchemists then, dear reader, brewing potions from tokens named Yam, Sushi, Pickle-delicious, really, if one ignores the $1000% APY promises that crumbled like a poorly baked soufflé. Discord servers buzzed like beehives at midnight, and the air was thick with the collective anxiety of a thousand wallets bracing for collapse. It was the Wild West, yes-but one where the only law was speed, and the only currency was hope.


![Gillespie simulations-conducted across population sizes of 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 with initial conditions of [latex]S=0.4[/latex], [latex]I=0.05[/latex], and [latex]R=0.595[/latex]-demonstrate that fluctuations in infectious individuals, when compared to mean-field solutions, exhibit empirically and theoretically derived variances, and that analyzing the quasi-stationary distribution for smaller populations ([latex]N=1,000[/latex]) provides insight into pathogen dynamics as defined in Table 1.](https://arxiv.org/html/2601.14869v1/Figures/high_quasi_sims.png)