The incident of mistakenly minting 300 trillion USD in stablecoins.

Paxos, the blockchain partner of online payment giant PayPal, accidentally minted a massive amount of stablecoin worth $300 trillion on October 15th due to a technical error.

Photo: cryptoslate.com

Market observers have detected an unusually high volume of PayPal PYUSD stablecoin being injected onto Etherscan, a blockchain tracking tool dedicated to the Ethereum ecosystem.

In a statement on social media, Paxos said it mistakenly minted the wrong stablecoins in an internal transaction, but immediately detected and corrected the error by burning the excess PYUSD. Paxos asserted that this was an internal technical error and there was no security breach. The company stressed that customer funds remain safe as Paxos addressed the root cause of the problem.

PYUSD is advertised as a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, fully backed by USD deposits, US Treasury bonds, and cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal guarantees that this token can always be exchanged for US dollars at a 1:1 ratio.

However, this technical glitch highlighted the fact that pegging the price to the USD needs to be guaranteed by PayPal itself and requires independent third-party verification, rather than being an intrinsic link to the stablecoin minting process.

Theoretically, 300 trillion PYUSD is equivalent to twice the estimated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the entire world .

The Paxos incident occurred at a time when stablecoins were becoming increasingly popular as they were accepted by many banks and payment platforms. PYUSD is currently the world's sixth-largest stablecoin, with a market capitalization of over $2.6 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Source: https://baotintuc.vn/thi-truong-tien-te/su-coduc-nham-300000-ty-usd-stablecoin-20251017122149016.htm