Gala Games has secured approximately $22 million in Ether (ETH) from the individual responsible for a “security incident” on May 20, where $200 million worth of Gala (GALA) tokens were created and a small portion was sold before the wallet was frozen.
On May 21, the attacker’s wallet returned 5913.2 ETH, valued at $22.3 million, which is close to the market value of the 600 million GALA tokens sold the previous day. Gala stated in a blog post on May 21 that the return of the ETH was a result of their team’s swift and effective response, as well as the involvement of federal law enforcement agencies.
Gala revealed that they used a new feature called GalaChain’s blocklist protocol to successfully freeze 4.4 billion GALA out of the 5 billion that were minted within a span of 45 minutes.
Eric Schiermeyer, Gala’s co-founder and CEO, mentioned in a post on X and Discord on May 20 that they had identified the alleged attacker, including his home address. However, Gala Games has not publicly confirmed the identity or method of the exploit. Some community members have claimed that Gala stated the attack was carried out by a security contractor who made a mistake by connecting to the wallet without a VPN.
Schiermeyer also stated in a Discord post that the team is likely to repurchase and burn equivalent GALA tokens using the returned ETH. He wrote, “I don’t see anything else we should do with the eth. We will probably buy and burn on galaswap.”
Meanwhile, a blog post from Gala Games hinted at a governance vote to determine whether the 4.4 billion blocklisted GALA tokens will be considered burned.
In related news, DWF Labs announced that it has acquired 28 million GALA tokens in the open market to stabilize the token’s value. The firm emphasized the importance of security for their investments and their communities.
According to CoinGecko, GALA has experienced a 0.4% increase in the past 24 hours, reaching $0.043, and has risen by 9.3% over the last seven days.