How does a stablecoin issuer mint $300 trillion of USD-backed stablecoin and burn it at the same time?

In a centralized issuance system, a mistake can be corrected quickly, but the record of the error remains visible on the blockchain. One of the recent incidents happened yesterday, where one of the biggest USD-backed stablecoins mistakenly minted too much stablecoin.

The event occurred on 15 October 2025, when Paxos, as the issuer for PayPal Holdings Inc. PYUSD, minted a huge amount that could potentially wipe out the entire global debt, printing a staggering 300 trillion PYUSD out of thin air, which is equivalent to $300 trillion since 1 PYUSD equals $1. This Paxos event can be seen on-chain on Ethereum blockchain with transaction hash 0xc45dd1a77c05d9ae5b2284eea5393ecce2ac8a7e88e973c6b a3fe7a18bf45634.

Fortunately, the team recognized this mistake, and based on the on-chain data, 12 minutes after this issue, Paxos quickly burned the entire 300 trillion PYUSD. Fortunately, during the event, there was no depegging of PYUSD, and it remained stable around $1 based on CoinMarketCap data.

It looks like Paxos had the intention to mint 300 million PYUSD rather than 300 trillion, as 2 hours later the on-chain data showed a new transaction where Paxos mint 300 million PYUSD.

So welcome to the crypto market, everyone, where there is centralization inside crypto. Keep building and move forward.

Reference:

• https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc45dd1a77c05d9ae5b2284eea5393ecce2ac8a7e88e973c6ba3fe7a18bf45634

• https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/paypal-usd/

• https://etherscan.io/token/0x6c3ea9036406852006290770bedfcaba0e23a0e8?a=0x2fb074fa59c9294c71246825c1c9a0c7782d41a4