Perhaps because I’ve only ever owned marginal amounts of GALA for working purposes, my outsider’s take of its slow car crash over the past year has been alternating shock and hilarity — something this week’s activities have only emphasized.
First up was the news that on 21st May, someone managed to mint 5 billion unauthorized new tokens, of which 600 million were sold for around 6,000 ETH (c.$22 million) before Gala realized and blocked further activity.
There’s a detailed breakdown of the exploit here.
Gala called the move “an isolated incident”, while CEO Eric Schiermeyer apologized for “messing up our internal controls”, saying the company believed it had “identified the culprit”.
Indeed, the swapped ETH has since been returned to Gala’s control and the rest of the unauthorized GALA tokens were burned, suggesting that “the culprit” was cooperating.
As for the impact on GALA’s price, the initial news caused a 19% drop but then DWF Labs — a market maker with a reputation for wash trading: also a Gala investor — stepped in, buying up 28 million tokens “to alleviate market selling pressures”.
The price is now up 21% from that low: at a high for May. If you were a conspiracy theorist, you’d say the whole thing was planned.
Me, I’m much more of the cock-up tendency and so I’ll just highlight that Eric Schiermeyer is suing and being sued by his co-founder Wright Thurston. One of the complaints is that Thurston stole and then sold $130 million-worth of GALA tokens, subsequently causing Schiermeyer to fork the entire GALA blockchain and creating the current GALA v2 token to stop Thurston’s access.
Another nice coincidence is that also this week, Gala’s president of blockchain Jason Brinks left with various other Gala insiders to create a new company independent of Gala to better support the Gala ecosystem because “we can do stuff we could never do while at Gala”.
Obviously not *that* stuff but it’s hardly demonstrative of a well-run outfit. We already knew that, however, even before Gala decided to expand into music and film, because … well … gaming and blockchain clearly isn’t hard enough.
And despite all this, the GALA token remains the #2 gaming crypto by market cap. Make of that what you will.
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Calendar
Axie Homeland starts 2-week cooking event — 22nd May
Wild Forest’s pre-launch NFT sale — 23rd May
Shrapnel’s STX3 test starts — 23rd May
Next Project Awakening playtest — 26th May
Shrapnel’s STX3 test ends — 26th May
Crypto Unicorns sunsets on Polygon — 27th May
Ronin-based Ragnarok’s first NFT mint — 28th May
Axie Homeland cooking event ends — 5th June
Decentraland Game Jam starts — 26th June
Space-based MMOG Influence launches — 27th June
Blockchain Gaming World news
Another Wednesday, another episode of the podcast goes live. This week, it’s with Anton Umnov, who’s the CEO of Canadian outfit Helika. It recently raised $8 million as it moves from providing on and offchain analytics for web3 game developers to becoming a one-stop-shop helping developers to handle everything from retention and engagement to monetization.
Or as Umnov, says “Our vision is to do everything except building games”.
Additional Links
Mocaverse has announced that 10% of the MOCA token allocation will go to NFT holders. In response, the NFT floor price is up to $16,000. Notably, only 31 of the 8,888-strong collection are listed for sale.
Sipher Odyssey developer Ather Labs has announced it’s launching its ATHER ecosystem/governance token. And, yes, it’s another play-to-airdrop campaign.
Check out the Big Blockchain Game Report Q1 2024 👀 here or 👀 via PDF.