SAN JOSE, Calif.—Crypto industry observers were left stunned Wednesday after blockchain data showed Paxos—the regulated issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin—had mistakenly minted an eye-popping $300 trillion worth of tokens on Ethereum. Roughly 20 minutes later, the entire amount was “burned,” or permanently removed from circulation, in what the company described as an internal error, Yahoo Finance reported.
The brief but extraordinary episode underscored persistent concerns about operational controls and error-prevention safeguards across the crypto sector, where even regulated players remain vulnerable to costly mistakes in automated token-issuance systems.
“For context, $300 trillion is more than 2.5 times larger than the entire world’s GDP, which is approximately $117 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. There is also only $2.4 trillion in physical U.S. dollars in circulation, per TradingEconomics. It cost just $2.66 in transaction fees to print this gargantuan amount of money,” Yahoo Finance explained.
So what happened? As many industry observers quickly speculated on social media, it turned out to be a simple fat-finger error.
"At 3:12 PM EST, Paxos mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD," the official account for Paxos posted on X hours after the incident. "This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause."
The two previous PayPal USD transactions made by Paxos just hours prior to the error, according to block explorer Etherscan, were both for 300 million PYUSD—decreasing the supply in one instance and transferring tokens in the other. It's what led most onlookers to think the mint was more than likely a mistake rather than a malicious attack, which Paxos has now confirmed, Yahoo Finance added.