What happened to the Gala Games? GALA token price crashes amid apparent hack of $2 billion P2E platform

by Arthur · December 6, 2022

What happened to the Gala Games? GALA token price crashes amid apparent hack of billion P2E platform

$2 billion GALA relocated after bridge failure – Photo: Shutterstock

Gala game (GALLA) is trying to calm “FUD” (fear, uncertainty and doubt) after what has been described as a multi-billion dollar exploit.

The blockchain gamefi company has assured its community on Twitter that this was just procedure and the price is on the way back up. But scars have remained, and at the time of writing, GALA was still down 18% over the past seven days.

GALA to USD

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A bridge failure

The PeckShield blockchain security organization raised an issue on the PancakeSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) after a single address managed to create $2 billion worth of GALA tokens. This sparked fears that the unusual activity was a sign of an exploit or a cover-up.

However, it was actually caused by the multi-chain routing protocol pNetwork, which provides infrastructure support for Gala Games and other decentralized finance (DeFi) organizations.

Specifically, pNetwork created a bridge for GALA, which allowed investors to trade between Ethereum and the BNB chain.

But a vulnerability was recently found in this bridge when the engineers had left a key in the contract. This could allow a malicious attacker to change the controlling address.

A Gala Games Medium post explained the vulnerability: “Essentially, the BNB Chain contract was a loaded bomb that could go off at any time if the malicious actor decided to exploit the contract.”

Gala Games contacted exchanges, informing them of the situation and asking them to suspend the BEP-20 GALA tokens. But not all exchanges decided to act on the information, according to Gala Games.

The Medium post continued: “With this knowledge, pNetwork adopted their plan to drain the liquidity pool to return it to users upon redistribution of the new secured contract.”

Not only did this FUD in the community, but users tried to take advantage of the price difference between the BNB Chain and the Ethereum versions of the GALA token.

Galla’s response and warning

Shortly after the issue was raised by PeckShield, James Brink, head of blockchain at Gala Games, reassured investors.

He tweeted: “Everything is fine. The activity you have seen on PancakeSwap is pNetwork working to drain the liquidity pool. GALA on ETH is completely unaffected.”

Both pNetwork and Gala Games’ Brink warned users to stop trading GALA on the PancakeSwap exchange. PNetwork said:

“A new pGALA token will be created to replace the old compromised one and sent in the coming days to those who had pGALA before the pool was emptied. This new token has NOT been issued yet, so don’t be fooled – we will share official updates in this thread.”

Can GALA recover?

It was going to be a successful month for GALA following the launch of the highly anticipated Spider Tanks game. Nevertheless, the mistake has caused the price of GALA to fall.

It opened at $0.38 on November 3 and climbed to a fraction above $0.40 that day. However, “FUD” saw GALA plunge to a low of $0.28, a 42% drop from its peak that day.

The game token has managed to recoup some of its losses. As of November 7, it was trading at around $0.34, but was still down 18% in the past week.