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Paxos, the issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, mistakenly minted a staggering 300 trillion tokens,before burning them minutes later.
Author: Sahil Thakur
16th October 2025 – Paxos, the issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, mistakenly minted a staggering 300 trillion tokens, worth well..$300 trillion ,before burning them minutes later.
On Wednesday, blockchain watchers were stunned when Paxos minted 300 trillion PYUSD tokens on Ethereum at around 7:12 PM UTC. Less than half an hour later, the entire amount was sent to a burn address, permanently removing it from circulation.
For context, $300 trillion is more than double the total GDP of every country on Earth combined.
The massive mint was visible on Etherscan, and platforms like Arkham Intelligence flagged it instantly. The reaction was swift. Aave temporarily froze PYUSD trading, citing an “unexpected high-magnitude transaction.”
In a statement, Paxos called it an “internal technical error”, not a hack or security breach. The firm confirmed that no customer funds were affected and that the issue has now been resolved.
Paxos clarified that the incident occurred during an internal transfer, and they’ve since fixed the root cause. However, the company hasn’t fully explained how such an astronomical error slipped through.
Not quite. Some speculated it might’ve been a UI or decimal misread, since PYUSD uses 6 decimals, a mint of $300 million could have been misinterpreted as $300 trillion.
However, Paxos didn’t confirm this. Instead, they simply burned the full amount without offering deeper technical details.
Despite the mint, PYUSD briefly lost 0.5% of its peg before bouncing back. At the time of writing, its market cap stands at $2.3 billion, making it the sixth-largest stablecoin, behind USDT, USDC, Ethena’s USDe, DAI, and USD1.
This burn now ranks among the largest token burns in crypto history, at least by nominal value. By comparison, OKX burned $50M worth of OKB in August, and BONK burned $50M in 2024.
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