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Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla has described last week’s accidental minting of $300 trillion worth of PayPal’s stablecoin (PYUSD) as a demonstration of blockchain transparency rather than a technical failure. Speaking at a Federal Reserve crypto roundtable, Cascarilla said a manual security lapse led to the temporary creation of the tokens on Ethereum before they were immediately sent to an inaccessible address.
“The mistake was entirely ours,” Cascarilla admitted, emphasizing that the company’s manual “cold minting” process was designed for security but rarely used. He added that Paxos identified the issue within minutes, confirming that no tokens left its internal systems. Despite the incident, he framed it as an example of blockchain’s openness, saying it “shows the transparency you can immediately have into what’s going on.”
The minting error—over twice the value of global GDP—stunned crypto observers. Bitcoin.com CEO Corbin Fraser joked on X that the team “forgot to use the Eth to gwei calculator.” Meanwhile, industry leaders highlighted blockchain’s strengths in accountability. Republic Technologies CEO Daniel Liu told Decrypt that incidents like this “show how easy it is for both people and machines to detect and correct errors instantly,” contrasting it with traditional finance’s slower disclosure processes.
The event comes as Paxos seeks a national trust charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, joining Circle and Ripple in pursuing federal oversight. Liu said the reputational hit would be short-lived, noting that similar “fat finger” errors happen in traditional finance and caused no actual loss.
Stablecoins continue to dominate the crypto landscape, with transaction volumes surging 83% year-on-year to $4 trillion, according to TRM Labs. Analysts expect the market cap to surpass $360 billion by early 2026, fueled by the GENIUS Act, which brought formal regulation to dollar-backed digital assets.
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