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Printing Money: Paxos Mints, Then Burns $300 Trillion in PayPal Stablecoinsdecrypt.co/344463/printing-money-paxos-mints-burns-300-trillion-paypal-stablecoins
158 sats \ 4 comments \ @ch0k1 16 Oct news

Crypto industry observers were baffled Wednesday afternoon when an on-chain transaction showed that Paxos, the issuer behind the PayPal-branded PYUSD stablecoin, minted $300 trillion worth of the tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

A little over 20 minutes later, all 300 trillion PYUSD tokens were "burned," or effectively destroyed, by sending them to an inaccessible network address.

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42 sats \ 3 replies \ @denlillaapan 23 Oct

just saw this, LOL. Fantastic.

My homie Matt Levine commented:

For 22 minutes yesterday, Paxos was just holding $300 trillion of assets that it had created out of thin air by accident. The price of PYUSD did not budge, varying between $0.9995 and $1.00015 while this was happening. Presumably if Paxos had announced “hey we created $300 trillion of naked PYUSD, want some?” then the price would have collapsed: The 2.6 billion actually existing PYUSD are worth a dollar each because they are backed by $2.6 billion of dollar assets; 300.0026 trillion PYUSD backed by $2.6 billion would be worth considerably less. But by the time anyone cared it was fixed.

Had a good laugh at this, alrightsy @Undisciplined

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35 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 23 Oct

So, what happens when one of these actors does this on purpose and actually spends it into the global economy?

How transparent are the proofs of reserves and claimed assets?

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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan 23 Oct

the peg breaks, and the "price" of that stablecoin goes to zero...?

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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 23 Oct

The peg breaks when people become aware of the situation, but isn't monetary history full of people getting away with overissuance for pretty long periods of time?

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