Okay, thanks for joining us, everybody.
We're about to kick this off.
We have a great discussion coming up today with three representatives of Gala Games.
Adam, I see you in the audience.
I will invite you to speak, and then we'll just wait for Jason to join us as well.
Mal, I've got you added as a speaker.
Thank you very much, and I've sent Jason a message.
He did have some important calls, so we might might have just run over a few minutes.
We can give him a minute or get started, but we will, okay, Adam, see you as a speaker
Maybe let's do some introductions.
Adam and Mal, do you just want to introduce yourself while we wait for Jason?
I'm the chief technology officer working with the platform, chain, and node teams here at
I've been with Gala since almost the very beginning.
I just hit four years now, so anything nerdy and blockchain and technology?
I've been with Gala for about three years now.
At least three years, I would say.
I'm one of the product strategists.
I was also one of the product managers for Townstar, one of our wonderful games.
Now I am mostly focused on speaking in places like this to try and find people who want
to build on Gala Chain and then helping them actually get onto Gala Chain, our layer one.
Yeah, we'll definitely talk about Gala Chain today.
So just in terms of CERTIC, we've worked with Gala Chain for a while now.
We've done a couple of audits for you guys.
You have one of the top security scores on the Skynet security leaderboard coming in
just over 95, which I think puts you at number three.
You've got your KYC Gold verification, two audits, and then just a bunch of information
that anyone who's interested in learning more about the security side of things can
So if you head over to skynet.certic.com, you will see Gala right up there at the top
Let's discuss some of the latest developments in the Gala space.
And I was looking at the document that you put out, the blueprint, which is a great one,
27 pages of reflections and projections for Gala Games and Gala Chain.
Could you talk a little bit about that ecosystem blueprint?
Just speak about the broader vision and the industries, the facets of the industry that
you're targeting and moving into.
Yeah, you know, Jason actually put a lot into that.
And I see him here if he wants to speak to that question.
But you know, to me, the blueprint is a commitment, a transparency, a communication artifact,
I like that it's the past, it's the future, it's the present.
I missed half the question because I was kind of going between being a listener and being
a speaker and there's a little latency there.
So I guess the question was mostly, let's talk about the blueprint.
I see Jason's copy on the document.
So no one better to hear from than you.
I wrote most of that, almost all of that.
But yeah, it's the Gala blueprint, let me back up and give you a little bit of history.
For a really long time, we've been somewhat reluctant to sort of share a lot of what we're
doing with the community for fear that we would get ahead of ourselves.
Because in development, as you guys know, things change.
So you can have the absolute best of intentions and then have something requiring a pivot.
And people who are not technical in nature don't always understand that pivot.
So we've traditionally speaking never done roadmaps.
We've never done, this is the thing that's going to happen at this point in time.
It's always sort of been a, hey guys, we're building stuff, come along for the ride.
And we've decided that we really need to look at things in a different way.
And we want it to be more transparent.
We want it to be more open with the community about everything that we're doing and kind
of let them know a little bit of what's going on and what's been happening.
Because one of the things that we've noticed is that there's a bit of a perceptional gap
between what we are, which is a protocol level company building an L1 blockchain that is
able to service all sorts of things.
And the community perception of what we are, which is, we are a gaming thing only.
And I mean, even if you look at sort of the way that coin gecko and coin market cap sort
of pigeonhole us, it's like, oh, blockchain gaming, blockchain gaming, blockchain gaming,
which of course we are, but we're a lot more than that too.
And so the blueprint was really our way to come out and say, hey guys, this is what we're
This is what we've done that you guys don't even know about yet.
And this is the direction that we're going in.
And we would absolutely love for all of you to come along.
So that's basically what that was.
I mean, appreciate the insights.
And I think you're right that breaking out of perceptions can be a bit tricky sometimes,
especially when you establish yourself for sure, and in this space as well where everything
moves quickly and people, you know, short memories, I guess, but that's also opportunity.
That's opportunity to create something new.
So speak a little bit about the vision, then gaming, music, every, I mean, this topic of
the space is beyond gaming.
So let's go beyond one of the, in order to do that, you need to understand a little bit
of the, where the gaming portion comes from, why gaming to begin with.
When we first started out, we had a tremendous reservoir of gaming experience.
You know, our founder, Eric, is one of the co-founders of Zynga.
And we have, and still to this day have a tremendous amount of deep gaming experience
and what that, you know, you kind of start with what you know, right?
Like, you know, why would you be people that have a ton of gaming experience and then try
to do something in med tech, for example, right?
So we started off with this goal to build a blockchain that would work for gaming, okay?
Because if you can handle the throughput that gaming requires, you can handle the throughput
that pretty much any other industry requires.
One of the things that I said in the blueprint is, you know, the, if you look at the number
of transactions that are required for a day playing FarmVille versus the number of transactions
required for a year at tracking every single container that moves through the Port of Hong
Kong, it's not even close.
A single day of gaming, you know, is orders of magnitude more data than, you know, an
entire year of logistics running through the Port of Hong Kong, which is kind of a crazy
statistic when you think about it, right?
So we started off with that.
And then, you know, once we had built something that could work for that, and that is Gala
Chain, we began saying, okay, well, what else are we doing here?
We looked at adjacent industries, and we consider anything in entertainment adjacent to gaming
because they are all interrelated, whether they're typically considered to be by sort
of everybody else or not, because all games have music, all movies have music, you know,
it all kind of connects together.
And so, you know, we started looking at that as the next, the next step.
And then now is we're going even beyond that, where we're, you know, connecting with all
sorts of, you know, other industries that are working across our node ecosystem and
So it's really, it's a lot of fun.
It's a fascinating, it's a fascinating evolution to be a part of.
I was gonna say evolution, good choice of word there.
So maybe Adam, I mean, we've touched on Gala Chain a little bit.
Let's talk a little bit about the technical aspects and what the problems that Gala Chain
solves are and the opportunities that it presents as well.
So, you know, what we set out to do with Gala Chain was build a, you know, strong foundation
with automation security, with capabilities, with developer ergonomics is actually a phrase
You know, any programmers in the audience will know how important that is, but easy
And then a key, like facet of Gala Chain is it's, it's horizontal scalability.
It's horizontal sharding.
So Gala Chain is not a single ledger.
Anyone who's seen some of the block explorers that have come out in our community now and
our own block explorer, you'll see the concept of channels, which we're kind of trying to
rebrand as ISO chains, ISO chains, sounds so cool.
But isolated individual ledgers with the same underlying foundation that, you know, because
of that horizontal scalability can really go to any level, right?
You just add on more chains to do more almost with no, with no end.
It is not a single peer-to-peer network like chains that you're more familiar with in the
So, you know, the, the sky is the limit kind of capacity wise.
The sky is the limit as far as developer productivity.
Anyone who's gotten into our SDK may be participated in the hackathon that we did this week.
We did just publish an SDK, check it out.
But you know, one of the amazing things about that is literally you just open the project
in VS code and then it hooks into Docker and launches the chain, a block explorer, a GraphQL
I'm the tech guy, so I'm going to get into all sorts of jargon, but literally just drops
you into a development environment, ready to go, ready to write smart contracts, ready
to write applications against Gala chain.
And you can use familiar, comfortable programming languages like TypeScript.
TypeScript is one of those, one of the most popular languages in the world.
It's more modern web application development space, but people who have those skills can
suddenly transfer them to blockchain development and all of the things that they expect and
know just work as compared to something like trying to learn Solidity, which is very opinionated
about certain things or trying to pick up Rust in order to develop on something like
So it's meant to be hugely capable, easy to use, easy to get started, familiar to the
And really it comes out of the box with token semantics, like fundable and non-fundable
tokens are obviously first-class citizens in the SDK that we provide, but it doesn't
even have to be that way.
It is a foundation that can do almost anything.
That's why I think Jason brings up the Hong Kong aspect pretty frequently, like if you're
tracking logistics or other types of non-tokenized workflows or patterns, it can do that, too.
What you can adapt it to is really quite endless.
I don't know, beyond gaming, there's a lot of places where you can go beyond gaming with
I think all the developers in the audience and those building on GalaChain will really
appreciate the efforts you've made to make it accessible and easy to use straight out
of the box, as you mentioned.
So that's on the developer side, making it easy for them to get involved to build on
Because I think one of the things that we've noticed or witnessed in the evolution of blockchain
entertainment and art is sometimes you need a reason for why it should be on blockchain.
And I think some projects have not necessarily always communicated that or the benefits of
the blockchain of why their exact platform is built on blockchain.
So maybe, yeah, if we can speak a little bit about how you are incentivizing users to come
across to use GalaChain and to feel the benefits of the technology stack that it's built on.
I think one of the things that's really important when we look at why blockchain is kind of
this weird question that exists as to why not maybe is probably the better question.
Blockchain should be something that is easy and accessible and adaptable to pretty much
any scenario that you would care to think about.
It shouldn't just be a, this is only a Roy Boy type thing or it's only blockchain because
you want to do a token sale, it's our only blockchain because oh shit, how else are
we going to get money out of it?
Blockchain should be something that is a critical part of the text act because decentralization
is something that is a tremendous benefit to every industry.
It makes it more resilient, more anti-fragile, more resistant to all sorts of challenges.
And so everything really honestly should be that.
For us, one of the things that we're focusing on is that ease of onboarding.
How do we make it so that the blockchain to the average user is invisible?
I went to go play a game yesterday or something that somebody had sent me to test and in order
to play it, I had to go buy a token, take that token and initiate a transaction to,
it's just like, God, it was such a pain in the ass just to get started, especially with
a brand new thing, right?
And so we don't want that.
We want it to be as simple and easy to use as possible.
And to touch on that more, I spend a lot of my days speaking to people who want to build
And a lot of the times they at that point, like you say, where they want to be on chain,
And often it's just because they just need explaining certain things.
They might not understand the technical side, the benefits of something, the reasoning.
So I've found that once you just sit people down and speak to them and go through various
reasons for different products and projects, whatever it is, they kind of start realizing
But I feel like a bit like maybe early internet where people just didn't see the points or
And then as soon as you explain it to them, it catches on, which I've found to have been
a wonderful thing to speak to so many people.
And it's once you explain to them or once they sort of hear like the different reasons,
and they're just super interested, which I think as the time goes on, people will just
become more familiar with why I think it's just like, it's half early and half, like
people need to make like Jason was saying, it's so like, it can be so techy sometimes
just to do a basic thing, like play a game.
Once people get beyond that and things are a bit smoother and a bit more education exists
in the broader web to world.
And I feel like people will understand like why they want to.
I think the tide is changing right now, like streaming services, centralized kind of web
to traditional companies, like people are getting more and more fed up every day with
the feeling of like you're being gamed for engagement, or you are being given a license
to watch something on a streaming service, or you buy something, you buy a music track
on a streaming service and you have it in your library, just until some licensing agency
decides that they don't want to offer that anymore.
And it gets yoinked one day, it's just gone.
Like people are getting burned more and more by that as the kind of traditional centralized
web to ecosystem is overflowing with like competition and venture capitalist funded companies
that are they have burnt down their cash piles and are now trying to monetize everything
they can, mostly with advertisements and engagement metrics and kind of dark patterns
and things like that, people are getting fed up with it.
And I don't think they know it yet.
But web three and blockchain technology really is the answer.
Like you cannot have something taken away from you without your willful interaction
without you know, signing something, you know, verifying that you approve of it.
But anyway, I think it's going to be a natural flow of audience, you know, natural flow from
the web to ecosystem to the web three ecosystem as the current powers that be in web two just
kind of burn out their goodwill with people.
I think I think that's a great point.
And I was just I was on tiktok the other day, and sort of as an example of how some of these
major web two or even older companies are sort of struggling to navigate the transition to the way
I mean, I think a lot of these.
So the the example I was thinking of was Universal basically pulling all of its music catalog from
tiktok, meaning that every single video made with a universal sound or an artist represented
by Universal was suddenly muted and the video is essentially broken.
And it really highlights the I mean, that wasn't a decision by the artist.
That was a decision by the label.
I think it really you can imagine very easily a situation where you there's more there's a
permissionless usage, artists are fairly compensated.
And and you just have a more functional ecosystem that that encourages creativity rather than stifles
So yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in what you guys are building here in at the sort of
intersection of art, entertainment, technology.
And as you mentioned, I think Web3 does provide a lot of answers.
Mal, maybe if you just you could run us through some of the conversations that you do have.
You said people get the idea once you present it in the right way.
What are some of the ways that you sort of send that message and the most effective ones?
Most of the time, it's just they they have, in a lot of cases, gaming so far.
So they're like, you know, what part of the game would be on blockchain?
They don't understand, you know, that there's nodes, for example, Jake, Jason, or probably
other magic could speak very well onto nodes and how useful that is.
But like, they just have no idea of the benefits of like nodes or some of them aren't familiar
with NFTs and how that can enhance their game play and just just the various like smart contracts
for like, you know, in games and if I'd RuneScape back in a day, I would have loved to, you
know, you have smart contracts to lend stuff safely.
I believe they eventually brought someone similar out, but like just these type of trustless
systems that make sense, like Renton and the ability to use someone else's thing without
even knowing them, as I said, NFTs, nodes, so many like various little things that people
just do not know are a thing that they can put in their game, or in terms of other projects
So it's, it's mostly around like what they've got, why does it, where does the chain come
in for them, they just don't know they have, they've focused so much on their project,
They're now just starting to try to understand the second half, which is I usually just say
go through with them, like, what is it you actually doing?
And then I will try and pull in my experience and my knowledge into what, what I would do
if it was maybe me or the things that are just available to them.
Because a lot of the time people are trying to have a save, save costs, or like nodes
can help with that, but like servers, Adam can probably explain that better why nodes
are great for like various projects and games and stuff like that.
I like the, there's the fun side of collectibles, the, you know, having, knowing you've got
number one or number 10 of something, it's just all small niches, I would say the people
lack the knowledge of, and then there's the overall Y, Y X in, you know, in Y.
So I feel like once you explain to them properly in a, sometimes it takes a few times, sometimes
they understand straight away, you know, everyone's different.
It depends on their, on their background as well.
Some people are just so web too, and they're just hearing about this, they hear a blockchain
game and not just blockchain products in general.
And they just sort of dive in headfirst, but they haven't had that like couple of months
where they've, you know, read around whatever ecosystem.
But the biggest one I find is just listen to what they, what they're doing, and then
just just interject with things that they could use that they don't have to, but that
they could, and they often seem to, they, once you get them started, they, they sort
of run off on themselves and of what they're going to do.
I think a lot of people of a certain age will have some very painful memories of, of RuneScape
getting wrecked on RuneScape that might make, might make the benefits of Web3 and smart
contracts very apparent to them.
So in the blueprint, you guys touch on founders nodes quite a lot.
Could you explain to the audience, the role of founders nodes in, in the Gala ecosystem?
So founders nodes essentially power the entire Gala ecosystem and in fact, power a lot of
Web3, whether most of Web3 knows it or not.
Right now, if you were to look at our founders node ecosystem in depth, you would find that
we, as of right now, power about 50% of all of the DHT routing for IPFS.
So it's the interplanetary file system.
So most of your NFT projects that are based on IPFS, where you upload your graphics and
pin them and things like that, most of that is being, you know, essentially pushed through
And that's something that we're, we're quite proud of.
But the founders nodes themselves also, as this ecosystem continues to evolve, will do
more and more to support the growth of the, the, well, to support the ecosystem.
I mean, from running isochains to performing certain functions, anytime anyone wants to
bridge something, there's a lot that they do.
But the other cool thing is, is that that same basic substrate serves to support games
that are building on Gala chain.
And it's, it's a very interesting prospect for a lot of games, because the way that typically,
if you have an L1 or L2 project out there, and they, you know, want to incentivize a
game, they offer them a grant, right?
This is like the normal thing, we'll give you a grant for X amount of money for this
But the problem with that is that you give them that grant in a token, right?
And it's either locked, or it damages your own ecosystem through, you know, like, you
don't want to give somebody a grant that they then go and have to immediately market dump
So then what ends up happening is projects have to do an ICO, ICOs are tremendously problematic
from a regulatory perspective, even if there's a way to do it in a, you know, compliant fashion,
you know, a lot of people mess that up, and it's, it's very possible to mess up.
And so what, what you're able to do through the sale of a node key is you're able to essentially
create an opportunity, sorry, essentially able to create an opportunity for somebody
to, you know, basically have a compliant offering of nodes to raise funding, without there being
the associated risk and without having a stupid, you know, broken ass ICO tokenomics
model where you've meant your entire supply upfront, and then you have to do all of these
things like burn it to get it, it's just, it gets very messy very quickly.
And so we're able to, you know, create a different ways to handle this.
Now what's really interesting is that, you know, the node ecosystem can make it so that
you as a project can reduce your costs in addition to raise funds.
So for example, Last Expedition is one project built on Galichain, it's a PVP, PVE first
person shooter, super fun, ridiculously fun.
They run an entire node ecosystem that, that makes it so that they're, you know, when you
play Last Expedition, you're playing on a node run by someone in that ecosystem, you're
not playing on a centralized server.
So last year when AWS East went down for a little bit, we didn't, you know, people were
still able to play the game, and, you know, do everything that you're supposed to be able
to do in that game without there being any sort of any sort of challenges or, you know,
And that's, that's one of the things that comes built into the, the Galichain concept.
So if you're interested in that, talk to Mal, he will help you out.
And if you're a distributed systems engineer and you want to work on the node ecosystem,
That's a great example of how, how the distributed system, the, the decentralization of the nodes
maintains uptime when you've got AWS going down, centralized systems failing, decentralized
So yeah, no, that's really cool.
Now let's, so in terms of community, I'm sure community, you know, is a major focus of yours,
both in terms of developer community and user community, and you want to make the experience
as seamless, as productive as possible for both.
What are some of the ways that you, you know, address community needs, hear their voices,
and just incorporate them into the whole ecosystem?
I mean, I, we use Discord as one of our main communication channels, and it has been for
I also have a lot of conversations, they know they can reach out to us privately, some people
don't want to discuss, you know, their ideas or the issues in public.
So they often come and DM us, which as a note, we never DM anyone first, we're always about,
you know, just scammers are a big thing.
So we have, excuse me, we have a lot of people reach out to us anyway, and come and speak
to us, which is, which is a wonderful thing.
People are more willing to share in private for, you know, for obvious reasons.
So that's one of the main ways we speak, we use like communication methods like this,
Twitter, there's other social platforms, but the main place you can really speak to us
is via the Discord, but Jason is also someone who travels around and meets a lot of people
He's known for his great events, buying everyone food and beers and being a great host.
Hopefully more of those will get to happen.
So we try our best to communicate in as many ways as possible.
But the main one is just, you know, when people reach out, just listen to them, speak to them.
We've always tried to do our best to die high of many great friends just from, you know,
listening to them when they when they come in.
You know, even the complaints, Jason is also someone who deals with people.
If anyone's got a complaint, he will go in there and listen as well.
So all the other gala stuff, you know, there's, there's that nice environment where people
want to ask the fault they can.
And I think that's what helps build the community when something's not right, or someone's going
well, or everything in between.
It's always a welcoming space where you can just, you know, do that, which I think is
very important, especially when you want to build.
If you've got, you know, if you need technical questions, you've got the gala chain channel
where you get to meet all wonderful chain developers will be in there answering all
the questions they can say for games, music, film, there's always someone there ready to
help answer your questions.
And we've got amazing mods as well in the gala community will definitely give you assistance.
Great to hear that people can get involved and get answers to their questions and get
help with with whatever they're working on.
So this wouldn't be a certain space without touching on security.
Obviously security is a paramount concern when when it comes to building blockchain
systems, something that you guys take very seriously and, and, and prioritize.
What are some of the the considerations that you that you had in mind when building designing
Obviously, I'm sure you have some relatively complex, you know, smart contract interactions
with with the platforms that you build.
So yeah, it'd be interesting to hear some of the unique sort of facets that you had
to consider when when chink our chain.
Yeah, I can speak to a little bit that I mean, it's it's all about testing and from multiple
You know, we have a very robust and testing framework around basically every interaction
that you can do with gala chain.
We get penetration tests done regularly.
We have our contracts audited both on the Ethereum side and the gala chain side.
It is something that is maybe not the sexy part of the work, but an absolute necessity.
And we spend a lot of time on it like it is not to be trifled with I'm sometimes the one
that is slowing things down and needing more time because you can't mess this stuff up,
It has to work cleanly, smoothly, securely, and, you know, verifiably with with audit
So we're all thinking about it constantly.
And so far, I think are reaping the benefits of that like it is it's working well.
It is I mean, we're number three on the leaderboard.
With that gold badge, it looks pretty good.
So I think we're doing our our part to make it appeal a bit more to people.
You know, an application that is not secure isn't functional.
It's not going to it's not going to work when you need it to work.
So it really needs to be number one on top.
Let's not rank priorities too much, but it needs to be a top priority for sure.
So it's great to hear that you guys are reaping the benefits of the work that you put in.
Anything else that you guys, any of you, Jason, Adam, Mal would like to touch on any, you
I know you just published a blog post inviting developers to use the SDK.
Any other news you'd like to share with the audience while we have them?
I'm just where it's it's what we can leak at the moment.
I was just hoping Jason pipes up for that one, because there's so many things that are
There's there's I'm having to keep myself on mute here because I am working in person
with a lot of people talking about a lot of things.
And I I want to make sure no, that's OK.
You guys can keep talking.
I've been keeping you muted so they don't hear the thing or the other thing or the other
But yeah, there's there's a lot that we've got going on right now.
And we're we're connecting with we're rolling out into the web three world more and more
and building building connections and bridges between between us and everybody else in the
space because, you know, we recognize that the future is multi chain and that all of
this works better if we work together.
And so you're going to see a lot more of of us connecting with a much broader world.
We're looking forward to it.
And it's going to be good times.
A couple of couple of things near and dear to my heart.
You know, we just launched our SDK, of course, go check it out on GitHub.
You just pull it down, install some dependencies and you're ready to rock on Gala chain.
It really could almost not be easier.
We just completed a hackathon online.
We are doing another hackathon at GDC, which is coming up at the end of next month.
We're gonna be there to there will be beer.
Yes, there will be beer, but there will also be massive amounts of code slung, I'm sure.
And then another big initiative that's dear to my heart is what we're calling the creators
So the idea that, you know, maybe you're not a chain developer.
Maybe you don't need to write your own smart contracts, but it's a tool set where you can
build your own, you know, your own entertainment experiences integrated with Gala chain, integrated
with all of our tooling, really easy to use stuff.
So if you're a game developer that wants to kind of dabble and use stuff out of the box
and not necessarily get into all the nitty gritty details of blockchain, we've got an
That is something I've been working on for a long time now.
And that's at creators.gala.com.
You can go and find, you should just check it out anyway.
And if you might not necessarily be a builder, maybe you decide to.
And just to touch on that, I think it's, that's been one of the most popular things when speaking
to a lot of the people who want to build on chains, the fact that you don't have to
be super savvy and that's adding importance for the lack of, you know, removing friction
and making so that the wider world can come in.
So that's something definitely was one of the greater announcements of recently that
made me very happy anyway, and a lot of other people.
And I also encourage everyone, if you want to see that shiny gold badge, making security
cool again, head over to skynet.certic.com.
You'll see gala right there.
You can also type it into the search bar, explore all their security metrics, read the
audit reports, get a, get a handle on the, on the security of gala and then go create,
go play, go enjoy, you know, what's being built here.
It's been really great to witness the evolution of gala, you know, since, since the beginning
And I think you guys are building something really important and doing it the right way.
And I look forward to seeing what the future holds.
Yeah, shout out, shout out to your team over at CERTIC.
You guys have been an absolute joy to work with.
You have caught some interesting things and we've made changes and improved security from
it and just keep up the good work, fighting the good fight.
I'll pass that on to our technical team.
Thanks everybody for joining us.
Any, any last links you mentioned, the creator portal, anywhere else that you can direct
people before we sign off?
Yeah, I'd like to invite everybody to come hang out in our discord at gala games.chat.
There's that there's a ton going on there and we're pretty much always in there talking.
We also have gala chain.com, which you'll be getting a revamp as well.
There'll be tons of stuff coming there.
If people want to just check them out until the new stuff comes in, there'll be some good
And I believe there's new, is it, do you know the news link off the top of your head, Jason?
I know it's hard to remember, I mean, you know, the news, the news place with the news,
the gala news on the.com.
So yeah, make sure you check out news.gala.com there.
We are pushing lots of information there so people can have an easy place to keep up with
what's, what's being done, what's going on, what's coming and all those good things.
Thanks for the, the, you know, blueprint as well, whichever one can read.
Thanks for all the links.
And yeah, it's been a great discussion.
So appreciate everyone's time and for joining us.
Look forward to doing this again as well in a, in a little while when we've got some more
developments to share and the future looks exciting, I think.