Ошибка Paxos: 300 трлн PYUSD выпущены, но быстро уничтожены Translation: Headline: Paxos Error: 300 Trillion PYUSD Released but Quickly Burned

On October 15, the infrastructure provider for stablecoins Paxos inadvertently released 300 trillion PYUSD from PayPal.

According to company representatives, the cause was an internal technical glitch rather than a hacking incident. The issue was resolved within 30 minutes—Paxos burned all the coins and minted 300 million PYUSD.

This incident momentarily disrupted the operations of DeFi protocols. As a precaution, Aave suspended transactions involving PayPal’s stablecoin.

As a result, the PYUSD exchange rate briefly lost its peg to the US dollar, but it quickly rebounded after the error was fixed.

The amount was several times greater than the current US national debt ($37 trillion) and the global GDP ($117 trillion), and it was comparable to the total amount of global debt.

Users expressed concern that «backed assets can be issued without actual collateral.»

*»But an even more alarming aspect is this: if the issuer can so easily create tokens ‘out of thin air,’ what prevents them from arbitrarily destroying any coins in the system—even legitimate ones? This means that by purchasing PYUSD, we must blindly trust the company not to burn our tokens—either by mistake or on purpose,»* added one user.

Similar errors have occurred in the past. In 2019, the company behind USDT, Tether, accidentally released 5 billion tokens on the TRON blockchain and immediately destroyed them. The issuer was supposed to mint 50 million tokens for the Poloniex Bitcoin exchange instead.

In May 2021, the crypto lender BlockFi mistakenly credited clients’ accounts with large amounts of Bitcoin and demanded the cryptocurrency be returned. The issue was related to a promotion that was supposed to offer payments in GUSD stablecoins.

In December 2022, a transaction on the decentralized exchange DeversiFi for 100,000 USDT on the Ethereum network incurred a gas fee of $23.7 million. This turned out to be an error, and the miner subsequently refunded the entire amount.

As a reminder, in September of this year, Paxos announced plans to launch USDH—the first stablecoin in the Hyperliquid lineup. However, the competition was won by the issuer Native Markets.