Paxos, PayPal’s crypto partner, has mistakenly minted USD 300 trillion worth of PYUSD in what the company calls a technical error.
Industry observers saw the injection of the stablecoin on Etherscan, a block explorer and analytics platform for the Ethereum blockchain. Paxos minted the stablecoins as part of an internal transfer before it identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD, according to a post the company published on X. Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after approximately 20 minutes.
More about the error
PYUSD is a USD-pegged stablecoin backed by USD deposits, treasuries, and similar cash equivalents, making he tokens redeemable for USD on a 1:1 basis. Yet, the internal error reflects that, while the dollar peg is guaranteed by Paxos and its independent third-party attestation reports, it's not intrinsically tied to the minting of the stablecoin.
PYUSD 300 trillion would technically require more than double the world’s total GDP, as there currently isn’t enough money in circulation globally to back up the sum. PayPal agreed to redeem PYUSD, and Paxos is the partner which will redeem 1:1. Paxos' error comes as stablecoins are becoming more mainstream, being adopted by an increasing number of banks and payment platforms.
The stablecoin is the sixth-largest token in the world at the moment, with a market capitalisation of more than USD 2.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. PYUSD was expanded in September 2025 to nine new blockchains through PayPal’s collaboration with LayerZero. The expansion also introduced PYUSD0, a permissionless version of PayPal’s stablecoin that maintains full interchangeability with the original PYUSD token. The new version will operate on seven additional blockchains, including Tron, Avalanche, Aptos, Abstract, Ink, Sei, and Stable.
LayerZero’s integration is expected to allow secure transfers of PYUSD0 across different blockchain networks without relying on traditional banking infrastructure. At the same time, customers and users will have the possibility to move their tokens between supported chains while maintaining self-custody of their assets.
