Your digital dollar just had a $300 trillion glitch that dwarfs global GDP. On October 15, 2025, Paxos—the company behind PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin—accidentally created enough tokens to buy every country on Earth twice over during what should have been a routine $300 million internal transfer.
When “Oops” Breaks the Global Economy
The error exposed how easily automated systems can go haywire when handling assets that supposedly have real dollars backing every token.
That $300 trillion figure isn’t just big—it dwarfs the entire global GDP and exceeds every U.S. dollar ever printed. For context, you could fund every Marvel movie ever made about 600,000 times with that amount.
Blockchain analytics platform Etherscan caught the mishap in real-time, displaying the mind-bending mint and subsequent burning process for anyone monitoring PYUSD transactions. Within 20-30 minutes, Paxos realized their cosmic screwup and burned the excess tokens faster than crypto Twitter could screenshot the evidence.
Industry Scrambles to Contain the Damage
DeFi platforms and regulators moved quickly to assess and contain potential fallout from the massive minting error.
DeFi lending platform Aave immediately froze PYUSD transactions as a safety measure, treating the incident like a potential contagion. Meanwhile, the New York Department of Financial Services initiated discussions with both Paxos and PayPal about their risk management protocols.
“This is a good example of a situation where Chainlink Proof of Reserve would have prevented this entire PR nightmare,” said Chainlink’s Zach Rynes, highlighting how real-time collateral verification could catch such errors instantly. The incident joins a growing list of crypto “fat finger” errors that have plagued platforms like Tether, BlockFi, and DeversiFi.
Your Digital Trust Just Got More Complicated
The episode reveals how stablecoin “backing” often relies more on issuer promises than technical safeguards.
This wasn’t a hack or theft—your actual PYUSD holdings remained safe throughout the chaos. But when automated systems can theoretically print money faster than most countries’ central banks, the 1:1 dollar peg becomes a matter of trust rather than code.
PYUSD ranks as the world’s sixth-largest stablecoin with a $2.6 billion market cap according to Coindesk, making this operational risk particularly concerning for mainstream adoption. If you’re holding stablecoins or using PayPal’s crypto features, expect stricter oversight and possibly mandatory real-time reserve auditing ahead.
