What happened
On May 20, 2024, an attacker used a compromised privileged GALA minter key on Ethereum to mint 5 billion GALA tokens. Gala blocklisted the attacker within roughly 45 minutes, limiting the tokens that could be liquidated.
A private key for an Ethereum address holding the GALA minter role was compromised. The token contract itself was not breached: the incident arose from inadequate control of a privileged key, which allowed authorized mint functionality to be abused.
Case & protocol details
Attack Timeline
The attacker controlled an address with permission to mint GALA and used that legitimate privilege to mint 5 billion tokens. They transferred the tokens to a new wallet and swapped roughly 592 to 600 million GALA for ETH. Gala then blocklisted the exploiter, froze the remaining minted balance, and later burned the unauthorized token supply through a governance-approved process.
The incident's defensible loss measure is the realized proceeds, not the paper value of all 5 billion minted tokens. Gala reported that the ETH proceeds were returned and used for buybacks and burns, but the sources differ slightly on the returned ETH amount, so this record does not present a precise recovered-USD figure.
Evidence & learning
Attack pattern
Compare incidents →Sources and on-chain records
- report Report x.com
- report Gala Unauthorized Token Minting Incident Report news.gala.com
- report Post-mortem rekt.news
- transaction Transaction etherscan.io
- analysis Unauthorized Wallet Locked Down and Funds Returned news.gala.com
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