Gala Games Exploited for $200 Million

By: Isha Das

An unknown attacker exploited the blockchain gaming project Gala Games on May 20, resulting in approximately $200 million in losses, as per reports. The attacker minted 5 billion GALA tokens through an admin address. Solidity developer 0xquit indicated that the attacker may have been an external hacker or a rogue address owner, capable of minting another 12 billion tokens before hitting a cap. The attacked address has been blocklisted, necessitating access to another admin address for further malicious activities.

The transaction details are available on Etherscan. Gala Games has not issued an official statement regarding the incident.

Price Down

Molly White of Web3 Is Going Great argued that the actual financial impact might be lower, as the attacker converted only $21 million worth of GALA tokens to ETH before the address was frozen. White noted that any large-scale sale of the remaining tokens would drastically affect the token's price.

As a result of the exploit, the GALA token price fell over 20%, from $0.048 to $0.038, in under two hours. The price has since recovered to $0.043 as of 12:04 AM UTC.

Past Incidents

This is not the first exploit for Gala Games. In November 2021, the project faced a $130 million loss due to another attack. More recently, in 2023, Gala's co-founders became embroiled in a legal tussle, alleging internal theft. The company also dealt with a $1 billion exploit in November 2023 conducted by white hat hackers, who safeguarded the funds but still caused market disruption. Despite these setbacks, the GALA token remains one of the top 70 crypto tokens by market cap, valued at $1.56 billion.