Stablecoin issuer Tether accidentally created $5 billion-worth of its USDT stablecoin at the weekend, before promptly destroying them again.
The mess-up occurred when the company was helping cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex conduct a chain swap, moving tethers from the Omni to the Tron blockchains, according to Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino.
Ardoino explained in a tweet on Saturday:
In another post, he explained that the error had occurred because there had "been an issue with the token decimals" when when preparing the issuance for the swap.
Ardoino (kind of) apologized for the error in yet another tweet, saying:
Minting dollars illustration via Shutterstock