On Wednesday, blockchain infrastructure firm Paxos mistakenly created a total of 300 trillion PayPal USD (PYUSD) tokens.
The humongous number of tokens was accidentally minted as part of an internal transfer, according to the firm.
The excess PYUSD was "immediately" identified and burned by Paxos.
In its statement, the firm also stressed that there was actually no security breach involved.
To put this into perspective, the total amount of money circulating within the US economy (including all dollar bills and coins, checking deposits, and savings accounts) currently stands at $21.9 trillion.
The total sum of money accidentally minted by Paxos is almost 14 times larger than the entire broad money supply (M2) in the US.
Biggest accidental mints of all time
Paxos's mishap is certainly the largest accidental mint of all time by an enormous margin. That said, there have been other similar incidents.
For instance, cryptocurrency giant Binance mistakenly minted a total of $14.5 billion worth of Binance Ethereum (BETH) back in 2023. Later, it accidentally created another $500 million worth of the token. Like in the case with Paxos, the excess coins were swiftly destroyed.
A huge accidental mint also happened on the Bitcoin network despite some community members claiming otherwise. In 2010, a vulnerability in its code (known as the "overflow bug") led to the creation of 92 billion BTC within a single transaction. This necessitated the creation of a hard fork.
In 2019, Tether also accidentally minted a total of $5 billion USDT tokens instead of $50 million.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team