Paxos, the issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted an astonishing $300 trillion worth of PYUSD tokens on Ethereum at around 3:12 p.m. ET.

“Paxos just minted the entirety of global debt on the Ethereum Blockchain,” said blockchain analytics firm Arkham. 

The error happened during an internal transfer due to what appears to be a decimal mistake — Paxos likely intended to mint $300,000 but ended up with $300 trillion because PYUSD has 6 decimals.

“This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause,” said Paxos on X. 

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The tokens were promptly burned around 20 minutes after the error, after being sent to an unreachable wallet address, effectively eradicating the excess supply.

Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg noted that PYUSD markets on decentralized lending platform Aave had been temporarily frozen as a precautionary measure.

It’s not the first time Paxos has made an embarrassing fat finger transaction error. In September 2023, Paxos paid $500,000 in fees for a $2,000 transfer on Bitcoin.