Gala Games’ CEO attributes a recent security breach, which led to a hacker stealing and selling $23 million worth of its GALA token, to “messed up” internal controls.
On May 20 at 7:32 pm UTC, blockchain analysts noticed that 5 billion GALA tokens, valued at $200 million at the time, were minted. The responsible wallet sold these tokens in batches.
The breach caused GALA’s price to plummet by 20%, hitting a 24-hour low of $0.038. However, the price has since rebounded slightly to $0.041, according to CoinGecko.
“We had an incident that resulted in the unauthorized SALE of 600 million […] GALA tokens and the effective BURN of 4.4 billion tokens,” stated Gala Games co-founder and CEO Eric Schiermeyer in a May 20 post on X (formerly Twitter).
“We messed up our internal controls,” he continued.
“This shouldn’t have happened, and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Schiermeyer revealed that Gala identified the compromise and removed unauthorized access to the GALA contract.
He reassured users that the Ethereum contract “is secure” and “was never compromised.”
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Gala believes it has identified the person responsible and is collaborating with the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and international authorities, Schiermeyer noted.
In another post, Gala Games stated that the “security incident involving the GALA token has been contained and the impacted wallet has been frozen.”
Neither Gala Games nor Schiermeyer disclosed the identity of the individual responsible for the breach or the method used to gain access to the GALA contract.
Gala Games did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.
In a related development from August, Schiermeyer and fellow co-founder Wright Thurston filed lawsuits against each other.
Thurston accused Schiermeyer of causing Gala to “sell off and waste millions of dollars in company assets,” while Schiermeyer claimed Thurston stole $130 million worth of GALA tokens.
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