Generative artist Piter Pasma’s Skuptuur collection — 1,000 digital sculptures “carved from a sea of infinite possibilities” — sold out in less than an hour on Art Blocks’. But users of Art Blocks are complaining after they failed to receive pieces they appeared to have purchased in the NFT platform’s latest drop.

What caused this?

Roughly an hour after the mint, an Art Blocks representative confirmed via Discord that the platform had fallen victim to a “block-reorg” — meaning a temporarily confirmed block of Ethereum transactions had later been replaced by a different block.

This kind of thing may have been just due to how blockchains work (small reorgs happen all the time) or it also could have been a user with the help of a miner putting the transactions in their favour.

“This is not something that Art Blocks has any control over, this re-org happened at the level of the state of the Ethereum Virtual Machine as a whole,” they said. The representative provided Etherscan links to the affected bloc