Pak’s ambitious project “Ash Chapter-II : Metamorphosis”, which was launched on March 28 did not have the smoothest drop. The drop was riddled with several problems and yet sold out within minutes of the launch.
Pak had tweeted a day after the drop that the mishap will be taken care of by the NFT platform Manifold XYZ, which developed the smart contract and the custom website for the drop. Manifold XYZ released an action plan, the details of what went wrong and the technical analysis on the same day.
Manifold XYZ first explained what went wrong with the drop. Users lost ETH out of gas transaction errors which occurred due to gas estimation problems. Bots purchased around 6% of the total supply leading to increased gas prices and thereby, decreasing tokens in the supply. There were Metadata issues for some NFTs in the collection and certain page load issues as well.
Manifold XYZ said that they’d take the following steps to “make things right to the $ASH community and those who participated fairly in the drop”:
- A new v2 contract will be deployed to fix the token metadata issue.
- All v1 contract tokens will be locked forever, and its metadata cleared out.
- All participants, except the botters, will be airdropped new NFTs via the new v2 contract.
A botter is a user that circumvented the 1 per transaction mint limit. There were 430 such users identified.
For botters, they will issue an $ASH claim website and a smart contract where the botters can reclaim their $ASH using their current token holder address over the next 365 days. This will be located on burn.art. Only the current token holder who has ownership of the v1 NFT will have rights to the claim.
- Accounts of the top 430 transactions (by gas fees) who attempted to purchase the tokens and experienced ‘out of gas’ errors due to gas estimation issues were being sent an additional token from the new collection, at the time of writing.
- Remaining addresses will be fully refunded with lost ETH from ‘out of gas’ transactions due to gas estimation errors.
Manifold XYZ said that they would continue to work with Pak and the other creators of the collection to re-deploy the new contract and re-issue new tokens. New tokens are being airdropped to existing holders replicating allocations.
They announced that the refunds will also be processed immediately and the new contract will be deployed in the next 24 hours from the time of writing.
Manifold XYZ warned the collectors that no action needs to be taken by them and that they should be careful and not fill any forms or visit websites for refunds. The whole process will be automated.
The NFT platform released a technical in-detail analysis about the issues that occurred, the lessons learned and how they would fix it in future projects.
The founders of the platform have expressed their gratitude for the patience shown by everyone and promised to stand by their community and do better.
“We will always stand behind our work, the creators we work with, and the community we work within. We will not stop working until we have fixed all issues as fast as possible in as fair of a way as possible so we can get back to what matters most: the art ” said Richerd, Eric, and Wilkins, the Founders.
The coveted “Ash Chapter-II: Metamorphosis” consisted of 7200 NFTs and an elaborate list of guidelines was released a day before the drop. The drop consisted of NFTs from celebrated artists such as Paris Hilton and Pussy Riot. The ASH token also experienced extreme market fluctuations before and during the drop, the price of which stands at $9.72 at the time of writing.