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

Decrypt ^ | 10 15 2025 | Ryan S. Gladwin

[yesthatjallen]

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."

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."

SNIP

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TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: bitcoin; crypto; inaccessibleaddress; paxosmints; paypal; stablecoins

[yesthatjallen]

Printing digital money or "a fat finger mistake"?

[PGR88]

LOL. This is not “money”

[Brian Griffin]

“Customer funds are safe”

Nothing is safe from IRS Woman. She leaps over every obstacle with court order in hand.

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

Think of all the electricity needed to create those.

[cgbg]

Even tulips were more secure than this stuff.

[catnipman]

perfect demonstration of how “a fat finger mistake” could crash the entire world economy if the crypto cancer manages to worm it’s way deep enough into the world economy ...

[EnderWiggin1970]

Nonsense. The exact same thing could happen with regular old fiat since 95% of it is electronic now anyway. But there is a key difference:

With crypto there is total visibility to the creation (and destruction in this case) of all funds, so the whole world can see what is going on. With fiat, someone could just create excess funds and no one would know, at least until an audit at some point days/weeks/months later (and even that is less than 100% certain, compared to crypto.) We NEED crypto to avoid stunts like this - how do you really know it's not happening in the fiat world today, or has happened in the past?

[EnderWiggin1970]

Think of all the electricity needed to create those.

These were created on Ethereum, which is a Proof of Stake system, distinct from Bitcoin's Proof of Work system. Staking doesn't require energy-intense mining. That's why the transaction cost was only $2.66 as stated in the article. But either way it only took one TX to create it and another to send the accidental funds into unrecoverable oblivion, so the cost would have been no worse on the Bitcoin blockchain.