Whale Alert, a Twitter account that exclusively reports large cryptocurrency transactions noted that stablecoin operator Tether minted 5 billion USDT inadvertently and subsequently burned it.
Whale Alert reported that a significantly large amount of tokens were transferred to the Tether Treasury from cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex through the Omni protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Tether Treasury minted 50 million USDT tokens on the Tron blockchain. However, the Twitter account also revealed that the tokens were burned later.
Tether reportedly minted an additional 50 million USDT on the same chain and later burned 4.5 billion USDT. Tether subsequently transferred 50 million Tron-based USDT tokens to a wallet that most likely belongs to Poloniex.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether and Bitfinex, quickly commented on the mishap, calling it a mistake and that they intended to mint 5 billion USDT tokens as part of a swap from Omni to Tron Tether. Ardoino said,
“While preparing the issuance for Omni to Tron swap there have been an issue with the token decimals. Please check the burn transactions below”
Ardoino further explained that issues like these are inevitable while working with different toolchains across various blockchains. Cryptocurrency exchange, Poloniex, seconded Paolo Ardoino’s statement by tweeting,
“Paolo is correct — this occurred while Poloniex was conducting a USDT chain swap with the help of Tether. An incorrect amount of USDT was accidentally minted, and this has since been resolved to the intended value.”
