Printing Money: Paxos Mints, Then Burns $300 Trillion in PayPal Stablecoins

Crypto industry observers were baffled Wednesday afternoon when an on-chain transaction showed that Paxos, the issuer behind the PayPal-branded PYUSD stablecoin, minted $300 trillion worth of the tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

A little over 20 minutes later, all 300 trillion PYUSD tokens were “burned,” or effectively destroyed, by sending them to an inaccessible network address.

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.

So what happened? It was, indeed, a fat finger mistake, as several industry observers were quick to speculate on social media. “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.

PayPal has to comment publicly on the error, and representatives for Paxos pointed Decrypt to its post on X, hours after being asked to comment.

The moves come as Paxos is seeking a national trust charter with the OCC under the recently passed GENIUS Act, among several other stablecoin issuers. If approved, the charter would allow Paxos to legally conduct business across the United States.

“If someone with a fat finger error can increase the total supply of a stablecoin by a factor of 120,000, then perhaps regulators should proceed cautiously with granting that firm with a national bank charter and keys to the payment system,” Policy Director at Better Markets and ex-Chief of Staff to former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Amanda Fischer, told Decrypt.

Of course, crypto users on social media have had a field day with the dizzying stablecoin mint. 

Some jokingly suggested the stablecoins were printed to pay off the U.S. national debt of $37.8 trillion, while others repeated the “trillions” meme that the Plasma stablecoin network uses for its branding.

“Trillions achieved incorrectly,” the Plasma growth lead known as Proof of Nathan said on X. “This isn’t the trillions I wanted,” Loopify, the pseudonymous founder of crypto game Treeverse, posted.

As the crypto community appeared to be broadly laughing at the situation, others also expressed deep concern that such a huge mistake could be made by one of the biggest stablecoin issuers in the world.

“Certainly not a good look to get the decimals wrong when minting stables and not having procedures in place to catch that early,” Martin Köppelmann, founder and CEO of crypto wallet Gnosis, said on X.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication with additional details and comment from Paxos.