Gala Games Hacked, 200 Million USD Worth of Tokens Illegally Minted, Token Price Drops 15%

Update Evening of 21/05/2024:

On the evening of May 21, the crypto community discovered that the hacker had returned all the stolen ETH to Gala Games' wallet.

Original Article:

Early on May 21, 2024, the blockchain gaming project Gala Games was attacked, with the perpetrator minting an additional 5 billion GALA tokens, valued at over 200 million USD.

The attacker then swapped the GALA tokens for ETH via Uniswap, successfully transferring 5,913 ETH (21.7 million USD) before the project could intervene. The hacker's wallet still holds 4.4 billion GALA, worth 185 million USD.

The Hacker’s Wallet on the Morning of May 21, 2024. Source: Etherscan

In a statement posted on X (Twitter), a representative from Gala Games confirmed the incident, stating that the hacker had successfully sold 600 million GALA on the market, but the remaining 4.4 billion tokens were considered "effectively burned."

Gala Games identified the cause of the incident as a vulnerability in internal access management and has contacted authorities to track down the culprit.

The GALA token price of the project plummeted from 0.04829 USD to as low as 0.0375 USD due to the attack, before rebounding to 0.428 USD after Gala Games confirmed the damage was not as extensive as initially reported.

1-hour Chart of GALA/USDT Pair on Binance at 08:55 AM on May 21, 2024

This is not the first time Gala Games has faced security issues impacting its token price. In November 2022, the GALA token dropped by 30% in a few hours due to a vulnerability related to the pNetwork protocol.

Additionally, two key personnel from the project, CEO Eric Schiermeyer and co-founder Write Thurston, have sued each other, accusing one another of secretly selling tokens for a profit of 130 million USD and mismanaging the project, leading to a loss of 600 million USD in assets.

Taylor Monahan, a manager at MetaMask and a prominent member of the blockchain security community, summarized Gala Games' past incidents in a series of long posts, questioning how the project has managed to survive until now.