Gala in focus, the upcoming NFT gaming king?

By Austras | Crypto in focus | 28 Dec 2021

Gaming, crypto, NFTs, Meta. There are alot of trends floating around the crypto world lately with investors and adopters running around between different projects that would be "the next big things". If you found Town Star and played it while holding onto some Gala you would have caught one such craze. I did play Town star at the start of this year a little bit but dropped it fairly quickly, ouch. Well, let's see why Gala suddenly got popular and if it's something that will stick around.

Background

Eric Schiermeyer left his position at Zynga in 2019 to go on and found his very own crypto gaming focused company, Gala Games. He had been with Zynga since the beginning as a co-founder, heading the projects that went on to become Poker, Mafia wars and Farmville amongst others. His own venture into crypto was due to his belief that this was the next evolution of the internet. Today Gala games have over 90 employees and several games pending release.

Gala itself has been flying relatively unnoticed after its main-net launch in late 2020, mainly due to there not being many games that supported it. The first one to do so was Town Star which was developed by Gala Games themselves. It was listed on Binance during September this year which caused a surge in popularity. Soon after it was also listed on Coinbase along with the new TOWN token being released. Lucky circumstance with the NFT and META craze brought more attention to Gala and this resulted in this coin breaching top 50 near the end of this year.

Network

Well what is Gala? Gala Games themselves maintain and develop Gala which is a token running on ERC-20 and BSC-20 contracts, main function being the decentralisation of gaming. Players can own in game assets as NFTs on-chain as well as function as node operators to help maintain it. The chain is both secured through the underlying layer-1 blockchain but also with their own sets of nodes which is run by the community and Gala Games, no more than 50.000 can be run at any given time. Users can buy accounts to run these nodes and earn points which nets them rewards in Gala as well as the right to vote on changes and games that are to be allowed to use the blockchain.

The nodes run though a adjusted "triple-proof" consensus protocol, using PoW, PoS and proof-of-storage together. The original 50.000 nodes are known as founder nodes and operate through traditional proof-of-work and get rewards accordingly. Anyone that is running one of these, owns a unique NFT which gives them free rewards as new games are added. Proof-of-Stake node can be bought on a game to game basis and gives rewards over time. Lastly, the proof-of-storage helps the developers of the different games store their games and data files on-chain rather than relying on a centralized cloud hosting service such as AWS (Amazon Web Service).

Use cases

Gala's use case is a bit more broad as opposed to tokens aiming to bring NFTs into gaming as it can be used for several games and developers can integrate into the chain. The NFT support is not unique and main different chains do this, but Gala also helps developers further decentralize their games and get closer to their players.

Gala today

The project is very new and many people are skeptical if it's here to stay (probably me included). It came from almost nowhere and is very high in top 50 now and have been on a steady decline since its ATH. The founder is very experienced in gaming and has made several hits before, if he pulls that off again that will help cement this chain on the marketcap top list. I feel it is still too early to say and that the NFT and Meta craze have been the reason behind its current price, it barely has any games live. Once those fade away it'll be plain to see what value the chain holds.