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 both minted and 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, makes the supply of the 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).

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