Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins

Paxos, the issuer of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted 300 trillion of the supposedly dollar-pegged token. For context, this is approximately 2.5x the global GDP, and around 125x the total number of US dollars actually in circulation.

Paxos later announced that the mint was an "internal technical error", and that they had burned the excess tokens.

While PayPal promises its customers that "Reserves are held 100% in US dollar deposits, US treasuries and cash equivalents – meaning that customer funds are available for 1:1 redemption with Paxos," there clearly isn't much in the way of safeguards to ensure that is always the case. As with most stablecoin issuers, Paxos merely issues self-reported and unreviewed portfolio reports, and monthly third-party attestations (not audits) of reserves.