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...