It sounds like a sci-fi plot — $300 trillion worth of new money suddenly appeared on the blockchain, more than twice the world’s entire GDP.
But this wasn’t fiction. It was a brief — and bizarre — technical mistake from Paxos, the blockchain partner behind PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD.
Earlier this week, blockchain trackers noticed an unbelievable number on Etherscan: $300 trillion worth of PayPal USD tokens minted in a single transaction.
Within minutes, Paxos confirmed it was an internal transfer error, not a security breach or hack.
The company quickly burned the excess PYUSD tokens — fixing the glitch in around twenty minutes.
Paxos explained in a statement that the problem was caused by a technical issue inside their system. “No customer funds were affected, and the underlying reserves remain safe,” the company said.
Even though the tokens were deleted almost immediately, the scale of the number made headlines.
If those tokens had been real, it would’ve required more than double the world’s total economic output to back them — highlighting how abstract and fragile digital money systems can sometimes look.
Also Read: Xiaomi 17 Pro Max vs iPhone 17 Pro Max – Same League, Different Worlds.
The incident reminded investors that stablecoins, though pegged to the dollar, rely heavily on technical integrity and trust rather than on-chain economics.
PYUSD, for example, is said to be backed 1:1 by U.S. dollar deposits and treasuries — but this episode showed that human or software error can still cause confusion.
This small glitch came at a critical moment for the crypto industry, where stablecoins are moving toward mainstream payment systems.
PYUSD is already the sixth-largest stablecoin globally, with a market cap over $2.6 billion.
The error didn’t cause any real-world financial impact, but it became a cautionary tale about transparency, automated systems, and the fine balance between innovation and risk.
Also Read: Honor’s Futuristic ‘Robot Phone’ Hints at a Radical Redesign for Smartphones.
