On May 20, an unknown hacker attacked the blockchain game project Gala Games, appropriating about 200 million USD. The incident caused the price of GALA tokens to plummet more than 20% in less than 2 hours.

According to Solidity 0xquit developer, the attacker minted 5 billion GALA tokens through an admin address, likely an external hacker or fake address owner. 0xquit says the attacker can mint another 12 billion tokens before reaching the limit.

However, the exploited address has been blacklisted, meaning the attacker must have access to another admin address to steal or mint more tokens. The related transaction has been reflected on Etherscan. Gala Games has not yet commented.

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

Although hackers have minted a large amount of GALA tokens, Molly White, a market analyst, believes that they are unlikely to be sold easily. Because launching a large number of tokens will immediately increase the supply of GALA. 

According to the principle of supply and demand, when supply suddenly increases but demand remains unchanged, the price of GALA will certainly decrease seriously. In other words, hackers are "stuck" with the stolen tokens. If sold, they will lose their value miserably.

GALA price fell from $0.048 to $0.038 in less than two hours, marking a drop of more than 20%. However partially recovered to $0.043 as of 12:04 a.m. UTC.

This is not the first time Gala Games has been attacked. In November 2021, the company lost $130 million in a similar attack. Then, in 2023, the company's co-founders became embroiled in a legal dispute when co-founder Eric Schiermeyer accused co-founder Wright Thurston of committing the theft.

Gala Games also experienced a $1 billion exploit in November 2023, carried out by white hat hackers. Although the funds were safe at the time, the incident caused concern and affected the price of GALA.

Despite much controversy, the GALA token remains among the 70 largest cryptocurrency tokens by market capitalization, with a supply worth $1.56 billion.