By: Stella L (stella@footprint.network)
This article was originally published in the CoinGecko Footprint Analytics column.
What is GalaChain?
GalaChain is a Layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for the entertainment sector but with broad applicability, built by Gala to support its expanding entertainment ecosystem. GalaChain is built on Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and is driven by a network of Founderâs Nodes.
Key Points
GalaChain is a Layer 1 blockchain developed by Gala, which aims to become the backbone of its Web3 entertainment ecosystem, covering games, music and movies.
GalaChain is built on the solid foundation of Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and is powered by a network of founder nodes.
$GALA tokens, as the basic utility tokens in the Gala ecosystem, are issued daily to active founder node operators.
Following the successful adoption of GalaChain across Galaâs core entertainment brands, a publicly available SDK and creator toolkit were launched in early 2024, expanding the scope of GalaChain development to creators and innovators beyond the entertainment industry.
GalaChain Introduction
GalaChain was originally built by Gala Games, a leading Web3 gaming platform and publisher, to meet the rapidly expanding needs of the 21st century gaming market. With its superior speed, security, and scalability, GalaChain is the backbone of Gala's core family of brands, with Gala Music and Gala Film both built on this network. The blockchain ensures that the various components of the Gala ecosystem can operate seamlessly, effectively avoiding the high latency and cost issues common to other blockchains.
The core power of GalaChain comes from the founder node network. The central token $GALA plays a vital role as a gas fee and is used to reward the power node operators who support the ecosystem. As a layer 1 blockchain, GalaChain can also facilitate the creation of other tokens, the establishment of channels, and more specialized node networks, such as game-specific nodes designed for games such as Common Ground World and Last Expedition, and Theater nodes for decentralized film content hosted on the Gala Film platform.
GalaChain's original design intention is very clear: to strongly support the needs of Web2 games, integrate Web3 features (such as ownership and rewards), and extend these capabilities to other industries. At the same time, GalaChainâs design concept is simple and ambitious: if it can smoothly handle the rigorous requirements of games, it can adapt to almost any application or industry demand. This strategy makes GalaChain a significantly scalable blockchain solution that is well positioned to meet the technology needs of multiple industries.
æ„æșïŒFootprint Analytics GalaChain Dashboard
The Team Behind GalaChain
Gala was founded in 2018 by Eric Schiermeyer, an innovator in the social gaming genre and co-founder of Zynga. The founding team brings together the creators of social gaming masterpieces like Farmville 2, Words with Friends, and Zynga Poker. Zynga, a global leader in interactive entertainment, is best known for its social video gaming services. Farmville 2's legacy as the preeminent farming simulation social network game continues with Gala's Common Ground World, which adds ownership, rewards, and unique farm simulation mechanics to the popular genre.
Galaâs partner network spans many of the biggest names in gaming and entertainment, including Universal Picturesâ DreamWorks Animation, AMC Networks, and NBCUniversal. Gala has also collaborated with legendary game developers like Peter Molyneux and Will Wright, and with music heavyweights like Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Bray, Kings of Leon, and many more.
Since its founding, Gala has established itself as a leader in Web3 entertainment. The development of GalaChain fully demonstrates its relentless pursuit of innovation, providing a solid and versatile blockchain platform to support its growing ecosystem.
How does GalaChain work?
GalaChain combines advanced blockchain technology with solid network infrastructure to create a versatile and high-performance platform for the Gala ecosystem.
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF)
GalaChain is built on the strong foundation of Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), which provides a modular architecture with interchangeable components such as consensus and membership services. This plug-and-play environment enables GalaChain to be customized to the specific needs of the Gala ecosystem. HLF is a project launched by the Linux Foundation in 2015, which promotes the development of cross-industry blockchain technology through a collaborative and community-driven approach.
A key feature of HLF is its private and permissioned nature, making it ideal for enterprise use. Companies like Honeywell, Walmart, and Bosch use HLF to build secure, scalable, and customizable private blockchains. For GalaChain, this means having a stable and adaptable chain that supports every component of the Gala Entertainment ecosystem.
GalaChain differs from other blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin that rely on permissionless, probabilistic consensus algorithms and are prone to ledger forks. GalaChain uses a deterministic consensus algorithm and has a specific type of node called Orderer as part of the ordering service. This asynchronous and multi-step process ensures that any block verified by a peer node is final and accurate, eliminating the risk of ledger forks. By decoupling chaincode execution from the ordering process, GalaChain avoids bottlenecks and improves performance and scalability. The blockchain is designed to integrate seamlessly with the Gala platform and Gala node network.
Founderâs Nodes
The Founders Node ecosystem is another cornerstone of the GalaChain architecture. Limited to only 50,000 nodes, these operators play a critical role in providing players with true asset and content ownership. By running Founders Nodes, operators help maintain a decentralized infrastructure that supports complex, decentralized tasks tailored to specific project needs. Daily allocations to these Founders Nodes are the only way $GALA tokens are generated.
In addition to the founder nodes, many projects in the Gala ecosystem are running individual nodes with specialized workloads. The Gala node network supports customized tasks and provides a unique method for project monetization, bypassing the complexity of traditional ICOs and reducing centralization costs. Their effectiveness has been proven as the backbone of existing applications and top games.
Developed by experts who have built some of the largest gaming networks in the world, these nodes offer unparalleled experience and scalability. This allows projects to scale their node networks as needed, potentially eliminating the need for data center and cloud hosting expenses.
The scope of operations of founder nodes is expected to expand significantly in the near future. They are expected to take on key responsibilities such as bridging transactions and chain security. Their versatility and ability to adapt to a variety of roles ensures the ecosystemâs robustness and agility, making it well-equipped to meet current and future challenges.
Features of GalaChain
The following features make GalaChain a sustainable and accessible platform for both developers and users, enabling a wide range of applications in the Gala ecosystem.
Environmentally friendly
Designed with environmental protection in mind, GalaChain consumes significantly less energy than other blockchain platforms while providing superior computing power. This design philosophy ensures GalaChainâs sustainability and efficiency, in line with global initiatives to reduce technologyâs energy consumption.
Developer-friendly
GalaChain pays great attention to the developer experience and provides a wealth of resources to make the platform more accessible and usable. Using TypeScript, developers can efficiently create contracts and tokens, which reduces the difficulty of getting started for developers who are not familiar with specialized languages ââââsuch as Solidity. GalaChain provides developers with an easily accessible open source SDK with built-in custom chain code templates to simplify the development process. In addition, the extremely simplified design of the Gala Creator Portal allows innovators and developers to easily turn their ideas into reality, providing convenience for creating more possibilities on the chain.
GalaChain Ecosystem
The GalaChain ecosystem integrates multiple platforms and applications, using blockchain technology to enhance user experience in areas such as games, music, and movies.
Gala Games
As the cornerstone of the GalaChain ecosystem, Gala Games has a portfolio of 17 games, including 6 early access games and 3 upcoming games. These games support multiple platforms such as browser, mobile (Android and iOS), Windows and Mac.
Currently, 12 games are live on GalaChain, including Champions Arena, Legacy, and The Walking Dead: Empires, which leverage GalaChainâs powerful infrastructure to provide players with a seamless and enhanced gaming experience. Galaâs carefully selected game lineup recently welcomed Voyager: Ascension, the first third-party game to land on the Gala platform. GalaChainâs integration ensures better performance, lower transaction costs, and greater security, becoming a key factor in Gala Gamesâ continued success and expansion.
Gala Music
Gala Music Gala Music is a decentralized music streaming platform powered by GalaChain and IPFS. Artists can convert songs into NFTs and sell them directly on Gala Music without sharing revenue with traditional producers. The digital signature of the song is uploaded to GalaChain as an NFT. $MUSIC is the native token of the platform, and Gala Music has over 20,000 Jukebox nodes, making it one of the largest DePIN networks. Jukebox node operators are rewarded with MUSIC tokens for supporting the ecosystem, benefiting artists, track owners, and listeners alike.
Gala Music allows artists to retain ownership of their intellectual property, providing transparency and improved monetization. Fans can engage directly with musicians through the platform and gain exclusive access to content and merchandise. With support from iconic artists such as Snoop Dogg and Jordin Sparks, Gala Music has registered over 200 music creators.
Gala Film
Gala Film is a decentralized platform that allows filmmakers to tokenize their work as NFTs. This ensures transparency, security, and enhanced monetization, giving creators greater control over their intellectual property. Through direct interaction with audiences, filmmakers can offer exclusive content access and merchandise purchase rights.
Theater nodes are the backbone of Gala's decentralized film ecosystem. By owning a license and operating a Theater node, users can contribute computing power to host movie content and receive daily rewards. In addition, users can own Moments - unique scenes from a movie or series that generate rewards every time the content is watched. These Moments vary in rarity, providing unique and rewarding experiences for creators and viewers within the community.
Additionally, the upcoming $FILM token will serve as a utility token within the Gala Film ecosystem.
NFTs
The GalaChain ecosystem includes a variety of popular NFT series, including in-game NFTs from Gala Games, music NFTs from Gala Music, and movie NFTs from Gala Film. These NFTs provide unique digital assets, enhance user engagement, and bring new monetization opportunities to creators. NFT enthusiasts can mint and transfer NFTs in the GalaChain Inventory or through third-party marketplaces such as NFTHarbor.io.
æ„æșïŒFootprint Analytics GalaChain NFT Dashboard
DeFi
GalaSwap supports direct token swaps on GalaChain, allowing users to seamlessly trade $GALA and other bridgeable tokens. The GalaSwap project token creation tool allows for the creation of custom tokens on GalaChain and allows creators to distribute minting quotas to on-chain addresses as they wish.
GALA Token
$GALA, as the basic utility token in the Gala ecosystem, is designed to facilitate seamless and secure payment and incentive mechanisms among network participants.
$GALA
$GALA aims to provide a seamless and secure payment and incentive model for participants in the network.
$GALA is the primary reward mechanism for founder nodes, with $GALA accumulating daily based on an uptime-based benchmark to support network workloads. Founders nodes also receive allocations of other tokens in the ecosystem, as well as a small percentage of NFTs minted to GalaChain.
$GALA uses the Gnosis multi-signature vault to ensure that no single team member has unilateral access, strengthening the principle of collective supervision and improving operational security.
The total supply of $GALA is capped at 50 billion tokens. The daily issuance rate is dynamically adjusted based on the circulating supply. The supply decreases when $GALA is used as fees within the Gala ecosystem or burned to support ecosystem activities. $GALA does not have any pre-minting or initial allocation at launch, all tokens are earned by operating a founder node within the Gala ecosystem, and 100% of $GALA is allocated to the founder nodes.
GalaChain Quota (Allowance)
GalaChain Quota is a system that grants rewards for running nodes or other various reward mechanisms, allowing users to convert these rewards into on-chain tokens within their wallets at their convenience. Once GalaChain Quota is granted, users can choose to convert or realize the quota, transferring the tokens to their GalaChain wallet.
This system ensures that rewards or tokens are reserved for users until they are ready to mint them, providing a flexible and cost-free method to manage rewards and in-game assets. It is an evolution of the previous Treasure Chest system used by Gala before the launch of GalaChain, when tokens were minted on Ethereum. It allows users to control any costs or tax implications of minting.
GalaChainâs Future Plans
According to the Gala Ecosystem Blueprint, GalaChain's roadmap for the third quarter of 2024 covers several key developments aimed at enhancing its ecosystem. The upcoming node workload development SDK will support the creation of nodes for specific games and activities, while the chaincode template reward program will encourage innovation among community developers.
GalaChain plans to create more open source options around leveraging its platform, alongside the GalaChain SDK that developers already use to build their own channels on GalaChain and deploy their own chaincodes. In addition, SDKs for Android and iOS will be developed to expand mobile development within the Gala ecosystem, as well as an SDK for Unreal Engine (a game engine developed by Epic Games) to support advanced game development.
Looking ahead to Q4 2024 and beyond, GalaChain aims to build bridges to other prominent blockchain ecosystems (cross-chain bridges), enhancing interoperability and the utility of the Gala ecosystem. Plans also include giving developers the opportunity to deploy Isochain on founder nodes, choosing the number of nodes required to achieve the desired level of resilience. This will incentivize and reward node operators, ensuring they continue to contribute to the network.
in conclusion
As the infrastructure of the Gala ecosystem, GalaChain combines advanced blockchain technology with a powerful node network. With significant influence in Web3 game development, GalaChain plays a key role in innovation in the gaming industry. With its innovative features, developer-friendly tools, and decentralized structure, GalaChain not only meets the diverse needs of the Gala ecosystem, but also lays a solid foundation for future development.
