Tether accidentally issues $5bn worth of USDT, claims it was an issue with decimals

Tether, the issuer of the USDT accidentally issued $5 billion worth of its own stablecoin while Poloniex was conducting a USDT chain swap from Omni to Tron.

The CTO of Bitfinex and Tether said there had been an issue with the "Token decimals," after which the company burned the entire 5 billion supply.

In what could be the most expensive typo ever made, Tether mistakenly issued and subsequently burned 5 billion USDT coins.

More than the entire USDT supply suddenly issued on Tron.

Tether reacted quickly and burned the entire supply within minutes.

Paolo Ardoino, the chief technical officer at Tether and Bitfinex, responded to Whale Alert's tweet, owning up to the mistake.

Justin Sun, the founder and CEO of Tron, confirmed that 50 million USDT was eventually transferred from Omni to Tron, providing the list of all token transfers to Tron.50 million #USDT transfer from Omni to #TRON. Please check the total issuance here: https://t.

After the dust from the incident had settled, a few theories about how and why did Tether make such a disastrous mistake came up.

On July 14, the Tether Treasury burned 4.5 billion USDT, which could mean that Tether's original intention was to create 500 million USDT. While this sounds like a reasonable explanation on how the company accidentally turned 500 into 5000 million, it left the question of how was it able to create 500 million USDT in the first place.

Tether hasn't been a stranger to controversy, as doubts about its ability to back all of the USDT in circulation with fiat currency have been increasing in the past couple of years.