CoinMarketCap takes a deep dive into Gala Games (GALA), an interesting addition to the blockchain gaming industry.
During the past six months, the GameFi industry that features the play-to-earn (P2E) element and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has taken over a major portion of the blockchain and cryptocurrency universe.
Gala Games is a platform that builds a range of blockchain-powered games, each of which provides players with true ownership of their in-game items through the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Launched in 2020, the platform was one of the earliest movers in the play-to-earn niche, by rewarding players in the form of GALA tokens for playing their range of games.
Billed as a platform that makes "blockchain games you'll actually want to play", Gala Games prioritizes the quality of games rather than launching the MVP-type games commonly seen in the play-to-earn space. The platform is an ecosystem of player-owned and controlled games, each of which offers something different to engage the audience.
The platform has been developed by a team of 60 and has more than 1.3 million active users worldwide. Gala Games’ CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, is also one of the co-founders of Zynga — a massively popular social game developer.
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How Does Gala Games (GALA) Work?
Gala Games is somewhat similar to the Steam store or GOG, in that it features a wide variety of games for users to pick and play. However, unlike these stores, all games are 100% free-to-play and are accessed over the blockchain through a decentralized application (DApp).
To date, Gala Games is working on a total of five different games — these are:
- Mirandus: An epic fantasy RPG adventure where players battle monsters in a variety of locations and build their land to earn revenue.
- Spider Tank: Spider Tank is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game that allows players to duke it out on a variety of maps using their spider tanks and various armaments.
- Town Star: A town building and development game that allows players from all over the world to compete to earn NFTs.
- Fortified: A PvP tower defense game that sees players put their strategies to test using a variety of player-owned assets.
- Echoes of Empire: An epic sci-fi strategy game that sees players wage war over the scarce resources scattered throughout the universe.
Players will also find a fully-fledged NFT store, which supports all of the player-owned in-game assets. These items are divided into six rarity classes: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Ancient, and can be bought or sold in multiple cryptocurrencies, thanks to its integration with CoinPayments.
What Is GALA?
The platform features its own native utility token, known simply as GALA. This is used as the main digital asset within the Gala Games ecosystem for purchasing items, peer-to-peer payments, rewarding nodes, and more.
Users can also contribute to the Gala Games ecosystem by running a Gala Node. This requires users to buy a license, after which they will be able to run the node software from their home computer and earn rewards in the form of GALA tokens, and potentially rare NFTs. As it stands, this license costs ~$13,000 in Ethereum (ETH), GALA, or Basic Attention Token (BAT).
The total number of nodes that can take part in this process is capped at 50,000.
What Makes Gala Games Unique?
Play-to-earn and blockchain-powered games with player-owned assets are nothing new in the cryptocurrency industry. However, Gala Games has a few tricks up its sleeve that arguably help it blaze its own trail in this increasingly crowded space.
Here, we take a look at some of its most prominent distinguishing features:
Built on Binance Smart Chain
Originally built on the Ethereum blockchain, Gala Games recently leveraged the p.Network Bridge DApp to bridge the GALA token to Binance Smart Chain as a BEP-20 asset. This allows players to dramatically reduce transaction fees when using or spending their GALA tokens.
Multiple Games
Games on the Gala network offers blockchain-powered gaming experiences where the platform has close to half a dozen games in its development roster. This includes RPG games, space exploration games, tower defense games, and more.
Built-in Store
Gala Games makes it is easy for players to buy and sell in-game items over its built-in marketplace. This allows users to easily source liquidity for their game spoils or purchase new items/characters to improve their gaming experience and performance.
Community-Powered
The Gala Games network depends on community-owned nodes that help power the platform. Likewise, the development team and operating staff are constantly engaging with the community to determine which games/features are most sought-after by the community.
This helps ensure that resources are spent delivering the games and experiences that people want and producing assets that are uniquely tailored to its community.
Massive Community
Unlike most play-to-earn games, which typically have a player base that numbers in the tens to hundreds of thousands, Gala Games has a staggering 1.3+ million active users. As a result, games launched through the platform are likely to become among the most popular P2E games in the blockchain space right off the bat.
GALA Tokenomics
The GALA token has a fixed maximum supply of 50 billion units. Out of this, close to 7 billion GALA are currently circulating. This represents ~14% of the maximum total.
According to the official GALA documentation, a total of 17,123,286 GALA are distributed each day — half of which go to the founder's node operators, while the other half goes to the Gala Games conservatorship.
Similar to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, Gala Games included a halving cycle in its emission schedule. The emission is halved each year on July 21. The next halving is scheduled for July 21, 2022, which will see the emission rate drop to 8,561,643 GALA per day.
GALA Token Address
GALA Token Price Prediction
Following its listing on Binance on September 13, 2021, the GALA token reached its all time high value, at $0.07633 per token. Likewise, trading volume for the digital asset multiplied considerably following the news, seeing it spike from ~$4 million a day, to over $500 million as of writing.
Is GALA Crypto Token a Good Investment?
As it stands, there are a number of reasons why somebody might want to acquire the GALA token (beyond mere speculation). These include purchasing in-game assets, operating a node, and maximizing in-games revenues.
However, the vast majority of Gale Games’ games are not yet live. As it stands, four out of five titles are still in development, whereas Town Star is the only game that is ready to play (in its beta version). With ~1.3 million users ready to be onboarded to these games, it is clear that there is potential for a significant uptick in demand for the GALA token.
Moreover, some of the games bear similarities to several of today’s blockbuster play-to-earn games — yet the entire platform has a very reasonable current market cap of ~$400 million. For example, Gala Games’ Echoes of Empire game shares similarities with the massively hyped Star Atlas, while Town Star is vaguely analogous to the wildly popular My Neighbor Alice.
The platform is developing a high-speed native blockchain platform to dramatically lower fees and ensure support for potentially tens of thousands of simultaneous users. In addition to the fact that Star Atlas and My Neighbor Alice alone are similar in market cap to Gala Games, there is good reason to believe that the platform is undervalued.
That said, it is important to note that GALA does suffer from significant supply inflation. Just 14% of the supply is currently circulating, while more than 17 million new tokens enter circulation each day. Considering its current value of $0.048, almost $30 million is added to its market capitalization each month.
All-in-all, despite its relatively high inflation, Gala Games likely still has a lot of room left in the tank for further growth — assuming the team can deliver their promise of producing truly fun, well-balanced games.
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