One day after the incident, on May 21, the attacker’s wallet sent back $22.3 million worth of ETH, close to the market value of the 600 million GALA sold the previous day. This development is considered to be a result of the rapid actions taken by the Gala Games team after the incident and the involvement of federal law enforcement forces in the investigation.

In their blog post dated May 21, Gala Games stated that they took advantage of “GalaChain’s blacklist protocol” feature in the rapid response after the attack. Thanks to this feature, 4.4 billion of the 5 billion GALAs printed were effectively frozen in a short time of 45 minutes.

Gala’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, announced in his statements on the X and Discord platforms on May 20 that the identity of the suspected attacker was identified and his “home address” was also known. However, Gala Games has not yet officially announced the identity of the attacker or the attack method. Some community members claim that the company stated that the attack was caused by a security provider connecting to the wallet without using a VPN.

Schiermeyer announced in the Discord post that, as a team, they plan to buy back and burn an equivalent amount of GALA tokens using the returned ETH. In this way, they aim to balance the token value by reducing the GALA supply in the market.

Gala Games’ blog post also pointed out that a management vote may be held to decide whether the 4.4 billion blacklisted GALA will be “burned”.

Following these events, cryptocurrency investment company DWF Labs announced that it purchased 28 million GALA tokens from the market. The company stated that this intervention was carried out in order to “stabilize the token value.”

According to CoinGecko data as of May 22, GALA price gained 0.4% in the last 24 hours and 9.3% in the last 7 days. Despite this increase, it appears that it has not reached the price level before the incident on May 20.

Gala Games’ “vulnerability” incident once again revealed the security vulnerabilities in cryptocurrencies and the risks that investors may face. Although the team’s quick response and the plan to purchase GALA with the recovered ETH is a positive step, the identity of the attacker and the attack method need to be disclosed transparently in order to fully learn from the incident. The Gala Games community and investors will closely follow the outcome of the management vote to be held in the coming days and the company’s future plans. This incident highlights the need to improve security measures and better inform investors to ensure confidence in cryptocurrency markets.