AltcoinsBlockchain
|3 min ReadPaxos mints 300 trillion PYUSD by mistake, then burns it
Carter Hayes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
What happened on-chain
Crypto traders did a double take on Wednesday. Paxos minted 300 trillion PayPal USD (PYUSD), then sent the entire amount to a burn address less than half an hour later. Ethereum data shows Paxos minted the tokens at 7:12 pm UTC and burned them 22 minutes after by moving them to an inaccessible wallet. See the transactions on Etherscan: mint and burn.
In the immediate aftermath, Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg said on X that Aave would temporarily freeze PYUSD trading after the “unexpected high-magnitude transaction.” https://x.com/omeragoldberg/status/1978556904512094333
Paxos response and market impact
Paxos said on X it had “mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer.” The firm called it an internal technical error, said there was no security breach, and that customer funds are safe. “We have addressed the root cause,” Paxos added. https://x.com/Paxos/status/1978565015943950411
PYUSD held its dollar peg, though it briefly slipped about 0.5 percent, according to Nansen.
PYUSD’s market cap is over $2.3 billion, making it the sixth-largest stablecoin behind Tether’s USDt, USDC, Ethena USDe, Dai, and World Liberty Financial USD (USD1).
How big is $300 trillion?
The burn amount was staggering on paper. Three hundred trillion dollars is more than twice the combined Gross Domestic Product of all countries, per International Monetary Fund data. IMF GDP data
For context, crypto has seen big burns before. OKX sent more than 65 million OKB to an inaccessible address in August to help keep supply near 21 million. The Bonk team burned about 1.7 trillion BONK in December 2024, then worth roughly $50 million. Related: World Liberty burns 47M tokens in bid to pump price as slide continues.
A rare back-office error. A fast reversal. The peg held. The system got a stress test, and it passed. Everybody knows it.
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