PayPal’s crypto partner mints $300 trillion stablecoins in ‘technical error’

Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.” 

Market watchers had spotted the enormous injection of the PayPal PYUSD stablecoin on Etherscan — a block explorer and analytics platform for the Ethereum blockchain.

Paxos had mistakenly minted the stablecoins as part of an internal transfer, before it “immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD,” the company said in a social media statement. 

“This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause,” it added. PayPal didn’t respond to an inquiry from CNBC outside of regular business hours.

Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes. 

PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis. 

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However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin. 

There aren’t enough dollars in global circulation to back $300 trillion PYUSD, which would theoretically require more than double the world’s estimated total GDP. 

Paxos’ error comes at a time when stablecoins are becoming more mainstream as its adopted by an increasing number of banks and payment platforms. 

PYUSD is currently the sixth-largest stablecoin in the world with a market capitalization of over $2.6 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.