Breaking GameFi news: On Monday, a hacker exploited GALA Games’ smart contract to steal 5 Billion GALA tokens, with the team calling it an “isolated incident.”
The GALA token from Gala Games tanked yesterday after a bad actor found an exploit in the smart contract, which saw them mint 5 billion tokens. At the time of the incident, the 5 billion minted tokens were worth roughly $240 million.
In total, the hacker sold around 600 million of the tokens via the Uniswap DEX, worth roughly $29 million. The price of GALA instantly dropped 20% within the first hour of the hacker’s big sell-off, from $0.048 to $0.038.
5 Billion Fresh GALA Tokens Nefariously Put Into Circulation
Notable smart contract dev and security auditor, ‘0xQuiet’ commented on X; “A compromised or rogue Gala Games admin address minted 5 Billion GALA ($200M) and has been systematically selling the tokens for the past 2 hours”.
A compromised or rogue Gala Games admin address minted 5 Billion $GALA ($200M) and has been systematically selling the tokens for the past 2 hours.
This is why decentralization is important – I prefer "can't be evil" over "don't be evil", and design with that in mind.
Outlaw… pic.twitter.com/aZkQZ2zYi6
— Quit (@0xQuit) May 20, 2024
What Is The Official Response From The Gala Games Team?
It took two hours from the exploit for anyone from Gala Games to address the situation. CEO Eric ‘Benefactor’ Schiermeyer posted on the Gala Discord to confirm the hack and give further updates to the community.
“We identified the compromise, and within 45 minutes, we secured and removed unauthorized access to the GALA contract,” he wrote. “It’s important to note our ETH contract for GALA is secure and protected by a multi-sig wallet. It was never compromised.”
Hey Everyone…
I always knew there was a reason I never talk shit about other projects getting hacked…I'm sorry to say we had an incident that resulted in the unauthorized SALE of 600million (21million usd) $GALA tokens and the effective BURN of 4.4 billion tokens.
We…
— benefactor (@Benefactor0101) May 20, 2024
The same message was then posted to the official Gala Games Twitter account. Later, Gala said that the wallet containing the freshly minted tokens had been “frozen.” They said the remaining 4.4 billion tokens in the frozen wallet are “effectively burned.”
This means that they can’t be accessed and should be considered gone forever. The post finished by describing the hack as an “isolated incident” and that they are working closely with law enforcement to identify the culprits.
GALA has since rebounded to a price of about $0.0415, which is impressive considering the magnitude of the exploit. The frozen wallet, a strong response from the team, and an overall green market are likely the reasons behind GALA’s strong recovery.
Disclaimer: Crypto is a high-risk asset class. This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. You could lose all of your capital.
