decrypt.co
Two co-founders of blockchain games developer Gala Games are currently suing each other in a Utah district court. Both lawsuits were filed on Thursday.
Gala’s CEO Eric Schiermeyer alleges the company’s director, Wright Thurston, stole $130 million in GALA tokens back in 2021 through his company True North United Investments, which owns about 45% of Gala.
According to Schiermeyer, the tokens were initially moved to a company wallet, then spread into 43 other wallets under Thurston’s control, before being sold in a “complex web of obfuscatory transactions” between September 2022 and May 2023.
The price of GALA dropped significantly on the news. The Gala Games ecosystem’s native token has fallen over 5% in the last 24 hours and is currently changing hands at $0.01657233, according to CoinGecko.
On the other side of the fence, Thurston alleges Schiermeyer went rogue, neglecting to seek his input while making transactions that led to the “sell off and waste [of] millions of dollars in company assets,” or as it’s known in legalese: corporate waste.
The lawsuit alleges Schiermeyer “exercised unilateral control over the operations, assets and profits” of Gala Games and “covertly acted and engaged in transactions on behalf of BGP [aka Gala] and used BGP’s assets and earnings, often for his own personal benefit.”
Both lawsuits ask for the removal of the defendant and the paying of multiple millions in compensation and relief. Thurston’s suit asks for $750 million, alleging Schiermeyer misused at least $600 million from the company funds, while the CEO’s lawsuit asks for the $130 million GALA tokens allegedly stolen plus damages.
What is Gala Games?
Despite the tumultuous press this week, Gala Games has been an early stalwart of Web3 gaming, with a pretty expansive cross-genre library of titles both live and in development, including Champions Arena, a free-to-play RPG battler with optional NFTs on both mobile and PC that launched in August.
In May this year, the company burned over $600 million worth of GALA tokens after completing its V2 token airdrop, in a bid to alleviate concerns around a "dump and exit" scenario. The airdrop, conducted in May 2023, saw the project's GALA V2 airdropped to all GALA holders in a 1:1 ratio.