Gala Games Addressed Their Vox Mint Issues, But Their Answer Wasn’t Pretty

Days back, Gala Games’ much-awaited Mirandus VOX avatar mint went live. However, it did not go as planned after an individual began easily redeeming Vox and became “too successful” with “random mint pulls”. Amid speculations of a hack or rugpull, the team has now released a statement. According to them, there was no hack and the issue arose from “some fundamental weakness” with Ethereum. 

Gala Games vox mint issues explained

To understand what happened, let’s first see how “randomness” works on the Ethereum blockchain. The Gala Games Vox mint had five different “elements” of randomness to ensure the mint was random. For one, Gala Games hashed the Vox using the Chainlink VRF Seed. 

“When a transaction hit the contract, the block height, time, and difficulty permuted that initial hashing to pull a specific VOX from the index and deliver it to the user’s address,” Gala games wrote. 

During the mint, someone “reverse engineered the Chainlink seed by emulating and debugging the contract locally”. After this, they used “a massive private mining pool” to choose the exact block and time to execute their transactions. With each transaction, they purchased a Vox box from OpenSea and exchanged it via the smart contract. 

It’s important to note here that it’s “miners” who carry out all transactions on the blockchain. Miners with high hash power—computing power required to execute transactions—can outperform other miners. Furthermore, once the process starts, developers can’t simply pause or reset the smart contract. 

“It was such an impressive side-step around ETH as a whole, that it shows we will clearly need to beef up the randomness via a variety of methods in the future VOX drops,” Gala Games added. “While they minted more than their fair share of certain rarities, the fundamental rarity of the VOX was not in any way compromised.”