$300T Glitch in PayPal’s Stablecoin Proves How Quickly Digital Money Can Be Created… and Erased

Stablecoin issuer Paxos briefly became the world’s most powerful central bank this week… by accident.

The company behind PayPal’s dollar-backed stablecoin PYUSD mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of tokens during an internal transfer on Wednesday before quickly identifying and deleting the error.

The company said there was no security breach and no customer impact, calling the incident a “technical error” that was resolved within minutes. The transaction, visible on Etherscan, was spotted by blockchain watchers before being quietly reversed.

To put the number in perspective, $300 trillion is roughly double the world’s total GDP and about 125,000 times larger than the entire stablecoin market, which currently stands around $306 billion. Even the largest stablecoin, Tether’s USDT, has a market value of about $180 billion.

Paxos later confirmed it had “added six extra zeros” while minting, accidentally creating $300 trillion instead of $300 million. The company burned the excess tokens and reissued the correct amount.

While the mistake had no real-world financial impact, it underscored a truth that makes crypto both powerful and fragile: stablecoin issuers act as programmable central banks, able to create and destroy digital money in real time.

Past industry mishaps have revealed similar vulnerabilities. Tether mistakenly issued $5 billion in 2019 before burning the surplus, while a 2021 BlockFi bug credited users with vast sums of Bitcoin.

PayPal’s PYUSD (which launched last year as a fully dollar-backed stablecoin) is intended to combine crypto’s speed with traditional finance’s reliability. Its market cap currently sits near $2.3 billion, making it the world’s sixth-largest stablecoin.

Still, Paxos’s trillion-dollar typo serves as a reminder that even in an industry built on code and automation, human error remains undefeated.