Key Highlights
- On Oct 15, Etherscan explorer reflects a transaction, where Paxos minted 300 trillion PYUSD stablecoins in a single transaction
- Later on, Paxos burned all minted supply. Developers ensure the backing of the available supply
- Developers have temporarily paused the stablecoin supply to investigate this incident
In the strange incident on the Ethereum blockchain explorer, the latest transaction shocked the cryptocurrency community as it reflects that Paxos has issued 300,000,000,000,000 (3 trillion) PYUSD, a native stablecoin of PayPal.
(Source: Etherscan)
This briefly inflated PYUSD’s total supply from its normal circulating supply of around 2.3 billion tokens to over 300 trillion, leaving the entire community in the lurch.
The tokens were minted via Paxos’ official smart contract in a single batch transaction.
However, within minutes, Paxos burned the entire minted amount through a burn transaction, which has restored its supply to the normal level like before the incident. In the latest post, Paxos shared an update on this matter.
This transaction has sparked a discussion in the community about its authenticity, as some people are saying that the transaction reflects incorrect data, while others are making jokes about this transaction, as this figure is equivalent to global debt, which currently stands at around $300 trillion.
One user writes on X (formerly Twitter), “Tether low-key just minted EARTH if true. Gotta be an etherscan bug frfr.”
PYUSD is Fully Backed: Chaos Labs CEO
Omer Goldberg, CEO of Chaos Labs, has promptly responded to the situation to avoid chaos and reassure the community about the stablecoin’s backing. He also mentioned that they have temporarily frozen the supply of PYUSD on Aave, a leading lending and borrowing protocol.
However, the issue behind this bug is still a mystery for developers. BGDLabs writes in an official post, “Following an unexpected high-magnitude minting transaction of pyUSD (TX), and even if the same amount was soon after burnt (TX), we have recommended the Aave Protocol Guardian to freeze the pyUSD reserve until we have total clarity of what exactly happened on the asset issuance stage.”
“Important to clarify that at the moment, everything indicates that the over-minting was caused by an operational mistake, and the Aave protocol is perfectly safe,” they added.
Major Etherscan Bugs In the Past
While no confirmation has come from official channels, it seems like a bug on Etherscan, which is wrongly showing the number. On-chain analytics called this incident a “fat-finger error” or internal system glitch due to a routine liquidity operation. This has also increased Ethereum gas fees.
In the past, this Ethereum explorer has faced many bugs, outages, and other technical issues.
There are various reasons behind these incidents, which could be client-side malfunctions or display errors, to infrastructure failures. According to developers, these issues generally occur due to parsing errors, API inconsistencies, or “display heuristics.”
For example, users reported discrepancies in ERC-20 token balances on Etherscan, where the “Token Holdings” section was showing inflated amounts compared to the actual smart contract balance. One user buying FOCUS tokens via Uniswap saw approximately 10 tokens in holdings, but in reality, a much higher amount.
This problem occurred due to Etherscan’s reliance on unindexed event logs from swaps, while the contract’s manual “swap” function overwrote the balance to a tiny value. It means the problem happened due to its event parsing mismatch.
Similarly, in 2021, Ethereum explorer’s API endpoints returned incomplete data for ERC-721 mint transactions. In this issue, users querying ‘txlist’ for normal transactions missed value fields, while ERC-721-specific endpoints show the tx hash but omit the 0.05 ETH min amount.
The web interface displayed the correct value via event logs, but API users saw “no value transferred,” leading to underreported figures. However, this was quickly fixed after it came to notice. This shows sync delays between API and frontend parsers.
