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+--- Thread: Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion (/showthread.php?tid=6311303)
Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion - Yin Yang - Oct 16, 2025
Quote: Paxos, the issuer behind PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, briefly created $300 trillion worth of the token on Wednesday due to a minting error, before burning the tokens within minutes.
The transaction was visible on Ethereum blockchain explorers like Etherscan, drawing attention from blockchain watchers. Paxos later confirmed the mistake on X, saying no funds were transferred and no users were affected.
The number dwarfs the entire crypto market and even global money supply, spotlighting the power stablecoin issuers have to create and destroy value with a few lines of code.
Similar incidents have happened before. Tether once mistakenly minted $5 billion in USDT in 2019, but the sheer scale of this error sets it apart.
That is an absurd amount- pretty crazy to say the least.
RE: Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion - Aeowulf - Oct 16, 2025
How TF do you accidentally mint that... That is concerning that it is that easy... the entire ecosystem would be trashed overnight if they decided to do that for real.
RE: Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion - Yin Yang - Oct 16, 2025
(Oct 16, 2025 06:13 AM)Aeowulf Wrote: How TF do you accidentally mint that... That is concerning that it is that easy... the entire ecosystem would be trashed overnight if they decided to do that for real.Whichever dev did that is getting fired.
Wild how there’s no consensus in place to have that approved either
RE: Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion - Hackers - Oct 16, 2025
(Oct 16, 2025 07:35 AM)Yin Yang Wrote: Whichever dev did that is getting fired.
Wild how there’s no consensus in place to have that approved either
It depends on the mint method. Some contracts genuinely mint separate objects or items on-chain. Others can mint "available tokens" that are low-fee to "mint" because they are more like an integer balance (until assigned/sent). I don't know anything about Paxos specifically, but minting 300 trillion tokens by accident suggests to me that they likely have optimizations in place for these types of bulk mints.
It's so important that people understand treasuries, max mints, etc. A lot of popular tokens could be wiped out with 1 negligent dev, or 1 bad actor.