At 3:12 PM EST, Paxos mistakenly minted $300 trillion excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD with no impact to customer funds.

Paxos, the issuer of PayPal’s U.S. dollar stablecoin PYUSD, disclosed that it accidentally minted $300 trillion worth of PYUSD during an internal transfer on the Ethereum blockchain in October 2025. According to Paxos, the error occurred at 3:12 PM EST due to an internal technical mistake, was not the result of a security breach, and was quickly corrected by sending the excess tokens to a burn address, leaving customer balances and redemptions unaffected. The transaction, intended to move around $300 million, was mis-specified by several orders of magnitude, temporarily crediting a Paxos-controlled address with PYUSD supply worth roughly 2.5 times global GDP before being removed from circulation. On-chain observers and analysts noted that the PYUSD smart contract architecture allowed a single externally owned wallet to mint unlimited tokens without rate limits or multi‑signature controls, which made such an error possible and raised concerns about centralized minting authority in regulated stablecoins. In the immediate aftermath, at least one major DeFi lending protocol froze PYUSD markets as a precaution, and PYUSD briefly lost its dollar peg before stabilizing once the excess tokens were burned and supply normalized. The incident has prompted scrutiny from regulators, including New York’s Department of Financial Services, and has intensified industry discussion on the need for stronger technical guardrails—such as multi‑sig wallets, minting limits, and better operational controls—around stablecoin issuance, even when the issuer is a regulated trust company working with large payment firms like PayPal.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Paxos Accidentally Mints $300 Trillion PYUSD - Unchained Crypto (unchainedcrypto.com)
• Explained: The Paxos PYUSD Incident (October 2025) - Halborn (halborn.com)

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