Blockchain data showed stablecoin issuer Paxos both minted and burned 300 trillion tokens of the PayPal USD stablecoin within 30 minutes, leaving many crypto users scratching their heads.

This prompted much amusement and confusion across social media...

But, as CoinTelegraph's Turner Wright explains, it appears to have been a big fat finger... 

In a Wednesday X post following the mint and burn, Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg said Aave would be temporarily freezing trades for PayPal USD  after an “unexpected high-magnitude transaction” of minting and burning the stablecoin.

Ethereum blockchain data showed Paxos minting 300 trillion of the US dollar-pegged stablecoin at 7:12 pm UTC and then burning the entire amount 22 minutes later by sending it to an inaccessible wallet.

PYUSD, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, makes the supply of the burned coins worth about $300 trillion.

The stablecoin has a market capitalization of more than $2.3 billion at this writing, making it the sixth-largest coin behind Tether’s USDt, USDC, Ethena USDe, Dai and World Liberty Financial USD (USD1).

In a Wednesday X follow-up post, Paxos said it had “mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer.”

“This was an internal technical error,” said Paxos.

“There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause.”

PYUSD maintained its dollar peg following the news, but its price briefly dropped by about 0.5%, according to data from Nansen.

PYUSD price immediately after the mint and burn. Source: Nansen

$300 trillion is more than twice the Gross Domestic Product for every country on earth, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

Some of the most significant token burns include cryptocurrency exchange OKX sending more than 65 million OKB to an inaccessible address in August in an effort to keep the supply at 21 million.

The project behind the Bonk memecoin burned about 1.7 trillion BONK in December 2024, but the coins were only worth about $50 million at the time.