Paxos minted a PYUSD stablecoin worth $300 trillion by accident and subsequently burned it.
On Wednesday, the issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin mistakenly minted stablecoins worth $300 trillion on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens minted were almost two and a half times the global money supply. According to sources, it was revealed that an internal transfer glitch involving six extra zeros was the reason behind this massive mint. However, just about 20 minutes after the tokens were minted and the company recognized the blunder, the newly mints were send to burn address- an address where the tokens cannot be retraced.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the entire world’s GDP is $117 trillion, and the stablecoins minted are almost equivalent to 2.5 times the entire world’s GDP.
Although there was suspicion about whether this was an orchestrated attack which Paxos was calling as a mistake, however, according to Ether scans transaction history, it was indeed a mistake.
Just before Paxos made this erroneous mint, there were two transactions carried out. Both of which were $300 million, where one was a burn of reducing the supply, while the other was a transfer. Therefore, Paxos’s response of a glitch of extra zeros was justifiable.
Meanwhile, the total stablecoin market cap has now reached $295 billion, with almost $175 billion on the Ethereum blockchain and $77 billion on the Tron network, the top two chains holding the largest number of stablecoins.
