PayPal Blockchain Partner Mistakenly Mints $300 Trillion Worth Of Stablecoins
Paxos confirmed the error and said it was part of an internal transfer, saying that the excess amount was disposed of. It maintained that customers funds are safe.
PayPal's blockchain partner Paxos accidentally made $300 trillion worth of stablecoin due to what the firm called "a technical error".
The infusion of cryptocurrency was spotted on Etherscan which is an analytics platform for the Ethereum blockchain. Paxos confirmed the error and said it was part of an internal transfer, saying that the excess amount was disposed of. It maintained that customers funds are safe.
"At 3:12 PM EST, Paxos mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD.
This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause," the firm said in a post on social media platform 'X'.
'PYUSD', the currency that was disbursed by Paxos, is touted as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is supported by US dollar deposits, US treasuries and other money market funds.
According to PayPal the tokens can be redeemed for US dollars with one token representing a dollar of the US currency.
CNBC reported that there were not enough dollars being circulated to match the $300 trillion stablecoin minted which was equivalent to an amount the exceeded the world's total estimated Gross Domestic Product.
It reported that the error highlighted the face that stablecoin isn't automatically supported by the US dollar but by PayPal via its independent third-party attestation reports.
PYUSD is number six in the list of the largest stablecoins in the world according to data from CoinMarketCap and has a market capitalisation of more than $2.6 billion.
