‘We messed up’: Gala Games sees $240 million worth of tokens swiped through exploit

The price of Gala Games (GALA) tokens plummeted on Monday after attackers minted and leaked 5 billion tokens through the Gala smart contract. The value of swiped tokens at the time of the attack was approximately $240 million.

Ultimately, the attackers sold 600 million tokens through the decentralized exchange Uniswap. This was worth approximately $29 million worth of tokens at the time of the attack. While selling was in progress, the price plummeted by 20% from about $0.048 to $0.038 in less than an hour.

“A threatened/malicious Gala Games administrator address has minted $5 billion GALA ($200 million) and has been systematically selling tokens over the past two hours,” 0xQuit, an anonymous smart contract developer and security auditor, wrote on Twitter.

About two hours after the hack was discovered, Gala CEO Eric “Benefactor” Schiermeyer posted an update on the Gala Discord server confirming the attack and explaining the situation.

“We secured and removed the unauthorized access to the GALA contract within 45 minutes of identifying the compromise,” Schiermeyer wrote. “It is important to remember that the ETH contract for $GALA is secure and protected by a multi-signature wallet. There has never been any compromise.”

The same message was also posted on the Gala Games Twitter account. Gala later said the wallet in question was “frozen.” As a result, the remaining 4.4 billion unsold tokens were described in the initial post as being “effectively burned.” This means that it cannot be transferred or accessed and is therefore considered destroyed. The total supply of GALA is 50 billion tokens.

Schiermeyer added, “We broke our internal controls. This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it never happens again.” “We believe we have identified the culprit and are currently working with the FBI, DOJ and our international network of authorities.”

In a follow-up tweet, Gala Games described the attack as an “isolated incident.” Gala did not immediately respond. decryptionThis is a request for your opinion.

GALA has rebounded to a price of around $0.04272 at the time of this writing, keeping the token’s price essentially flat over the past 24 hours. This is partly due to the market-wide surge, with Ethereum itself surging 20% ​​in the past day, with the residual effects of market fluctuations clearly appearing to offset the impact of sales.

In 2023, Schiermeyer sued fellow Gala co-founder Wright Thurston, claiming the latter stole $130 million in GALA tokens.

According to the lawsuit, GALA tokens were moved from the company’s wallets and distributed to 43 wallets controlled by Thurston before being sold between September 2022 and May 2023.

In his counterclaim, Thurston claims Schiermeyer neglected to seek his input during the transaction, which led to the “sale and waste of millions of dollars in company assets.”

Editor: Andrew Hayward