Paxos Fat-Fingers $300t of PayPal’s Pyusd, Outpacing US Dollar’s (USD) $2.4T Supply
On Wednesday, StableCoin Paxos accidentally minted $300 trillion worth of PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Pyusd StableCoin in Ethereum – a “fat finger” blockchain error that exceeded the total US dollars in circulation by $2.4 trillion.
“At 3:12 pm EST, Paxos mistakenly minted excess pyusd as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately recognized the error and burned the excess PYUSD,” Paxos announced on X.
The issuer explained that a technical glitch caused the PYUSD supply to expand rapidly and unintentionally, which was quickly identified and resolved. Paxos emphasized that this was not a security breach and assured that all customer funds would remain safe.
However, the fact that a technical issue led to the massive cost of creating StableCoin without the necessary collateral has raised eyebrows.
“It’s not the dollar amount that you should think about. It’s the fact that it’s a collateralized asset that can be created without collateral,” a popular pseudonymous market commentator, VBL’s Ghost, said.
At the time of writing, Pyusd ranks as the seventh largest StableCoin in the world, with a market value of $2.64 billion. Each token is fully backed by highly liquid, high-quality reserve assets to maintain a 1:1 peg with the US dollar.
Fat finger errors have happened before in the crypto market. In 2019, Tether, the world’s largest dollar-denominated stablecoin USDT, was mistakenly minted and quickly destroyed $5 billion in USDT.
