The NFT minting platform Manifold said a combination of bots and “too much traffic” were responsible for a chaotic NFT drop that caused hundreds of buyers to lose thousands of dollars worth of $ETH in gas fees, without ever receiving the tokens they purchased.
The “Ash Chapter-II : Metamorphosis” project by the digital artist Pak was a collaboration with 29 other NFT artists, including Pussy Riot, Paris Hilton and others. The March 28 drop was sold out within just minutes of its launch, yet it quickly became apparent that it was riddled with errors.
Worse yet, insiders who were among the first to become aware of the problems promptly dumped thousands of $ASH tokens that were required to buy the NFTs, crashing its price and leaving hundreds of buyers with bags of seriously undervalued crypto.
It’s thought that users lost thousands, potentially even millions of dollars, due to the higher than expected gas fees they paid, the failure to receive their NFTs, and the lost value of the $ASH tokens many still hold.
Some Twitter users say the failed drop was due to Manifold’s use of a “randomizer” that was designed to ensure buyers receive a random NFT from the collection. Unfortunately, the randomizer code doesn’t appear to have been audited, and errors caused many NFTs to generate much higher gas fees in $ETH than user’s wallets estimated. As a result, when transactions hit the blockchain many of them failed due to the lack of enough gas. So while the payments were rejected, users still lost their gas fees – up to 0.8 $ETH (worth $2,586 at the time of writing) in some cases – for the failed transactions and didn’t receive their NFTs.
User’s losses further escalated as the failure of the drop became apparent. Within minutes, large numbers of $ASH tokens were dumped on various exchanges, driving the price down by more than 60% in a matter of minutes. While this can’t be confirmed, the suspicion immediately fell on “insiders” connected to Manifold in some way, who would have been the first to learn of the problems.
Manifold, which built the smart contract for the NFT sale, was quick to confess to the failed airdrop, but rather than admit any negligence it blamed the problems on a combination of three factors. It said these were gas spikes caused by aggressive botting, poor MetaMask gas estimation issues and some buyers manually changing their gas fee estimations.
“Unfortunately the drop did not go as planned,” Manifold said in an update on its website, adding that it accepts “full responsibility” for the problems.
The Twitterati was quick to criticize Manifold, with various users arguing that none of these apparent “issues” actually had any impact on the drop.