Manifold, an NFT platform, has found itself at the center of suspicion following an abortive NFT drop involving popular digital artist Pak. Those wanting to buy the non-fungible tokens were asked to purchase the $ASH tokens. However, the platform bungled the drop that took place on March 28.
Hundreds of users reported that their transactions failed. Many did not receive their NFTs but were charged exorbitant $ETH gas fees for the failed transactions. Some users even claimed that they lost up to 0.8 ETH, about $2,750. And then there was the sudden drop in the value of $ASH tokens that hundreds of users were left holding onto. It soon became apparent to Manifold that someone dumped millions of $ASH tokens onto exchanges. This prompted the price to plunge by more than 60% in just minutes. The users were left with useless undervalued tokens.
Analysts highlighted that this incident is a classic “pump-and-dump” as the price of $ASH rocketed from $15.61 to the highs of $24.56 in hours right before the NFT drop. But within minutes of the drop, the price of the tokens took a u-turn to the low of $8.09. At the time of writing this article, ASH, as per CoinGecko was down by 15.3% in the last 24-hours and trading at $5.51. The price is yet to recover.
To prevent its name from coming into a bad light, Manifold published an autopsy of the incident. The platform squarely blamed hundreds of “bottlers”. Manifold highlighted that metadata issues with some NFTs and network congestion caused MetaMask wallets to have trouble with their gas fee estimations. It said this wasn’t the experience they had in mind.
But some users just wouldn’t let the issue rest. A Cody Randolph said Manifold was playing “blaming games”. The user believes the platform should take full responsibility for messing things up.
