A $300 trillion fat-finger, as Paxos accidentally mints PYUSD… before burning it
Crypto users were left scrambling on Wednesday after Paxos minted 300 trillion of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, then sent it all to a burn address.
Blockchain data showed stablecoin issuer Paxos minted then burned 300 trillion tokens of the PayPal USD stablecoin within 30 minutes, leaving many crypto users scratching their heads.
In a Wednesday X post following the mint and burn, Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg said Aave would be temporarily freezing trades for PayPal USD (PYUSD) after an “unexpected high-magnitude transaction” of minting and burning the stablecoin. Ethereum blockchain data showed Paxos minting 300 trillion of the US dollar-pegged stablecoin at 7:12 pm UTC and then burning the entire amount 22 minutes later by sending it to an inaccessible wallet.
PYUSD, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, made the supply of burned coins worth about $300 trillion. The stablecoin has a market capitalization of more than $2.3 billion at this writing, making it the sixth-largest coin behind Tether’s USDt (USDT), USDC (USDC), Ethena USDe (USDE), Dai (DAI) and World Liberty Financial USD (USD1).
