The Gala Games Lawsuit: Inside the Alleged $130 Million Founder Feud

In this case the founders sue each other over the same tokens, and each says the other took what belonged to the company. On August 31, 2023, Schiermeyer sued Thurston on Gala's behalf over billions of moved GALA tokens. True North, Thurston's investment vehicle, sued in its own name the same day, and the court merged the cases on October 27, 2023.

Here's the judge's neutral summary, from his August 21, 2024 order: "Mr. Schiermeyer contends that Mr. Thurston stole cryptocurrency tokens worth millions of dollars from Gala Games. Mr. Thurston, however, maintains that those tokens belonged to True North, not to Gala Games, and that it is Mr. Schiermeyer who has stolen, wasted, and misused corporate assets."

What Eric Schiermeyer alleged

His August 31, 2023 complaint alleges that on February 3, 2021, 8,645,014,077 GALA moved "in a series of 43 rapid transactions" from company wallets into 43 wallets controlled by Thurston and/or True North, worth "at least $130,129,779.60" when they reached centralized exchanges. So the famous $130 million is an alleged exchange-deposit value, nothing more.

The October 9, 2023 order summarizes his side of the story. His plan, it says, was GALA v2 (a replacement token Gala rolled out in May 2023), "which would render worthless any of the tokens Mr. Thurston had taken but not yet sold." The same summary says Thurston "may have liquidated as many as 3.5 billion GALA tokens" first, leaving 5.1 billion "now-outdated" ones.

What Wright Thurston alleged back

The counterclaim Thurston and True North filed on November 3, 2023 alleges Schiermeyer directed a burn of about 20.9 billion GALA "worth more than $600 million" without board approval, and lent himself millions in company funds.

Judge Howard C. Nielson Jr. has denied four emergency motions, one from Schiermeyer and three from Thurston's side; his August 2024 order calls the last one the "fourth time that a party has moved for preliminary relief." In February 2025 the court also trimmed the counterclaims. No court has ruled on who owns the tokens or on the theft claim.

Gala nodes are licensed network nodes that earn GALA rewards, and the company suspended 7,000 of True North's. The October 2023 order has the line everyone quotes: "cryptocurrency tokens are the epitome of fungible property." Meaning a stolen-crypto claim is a money problem a court can fix later, so it doesn't justify an emergency freeze. The nodes ruling ran on the same logic: the harm, in the judge's words, "reduces to a math equation," and he didn't decide who owns the nodes.

Still open as of October 10, 2026. Discovery has been stayed since December 23, 2025, while the court works out how the case fits around the arbitration it compelled. Since then:

• Dec 31, 2025: Thurston's side moved to stay that arbitration.

• Feb 9, 2026: a non-party moved to intervene.

• May 2026: Thurston's lawyers filed withdrawal notices.

• Aug 8, 2026: the newest visible entry, an order about filing a document under seal.

The company also wants True North's crossclaims tossed for lack of prosecution. We couldn't find a ruling on any of it. Our guess? A merits decision is probably years away, if one ever comes.

It kept running. Gala's newsroom posted updates on October 5 and 6, 2026, including a GalaSwap V2 launch.

The token's a different story. GALA traded around $0.0166 on September 4, 2023 after falling over 5% in a day, per Decrypt. But Blockchain Gamer noted on September 5, 2023 that GALA was already about 98% below its late-2021 high before the suits landed.

As of October 10, 2026, CoinGecko shows GALA near $0.0024. The data can't say how much of the slide, if any, came from the lawsuit. For context, see the wider web3 gaming crash. That's history, not a forecast.

Several unrelated Gala stories get lumped in with this case. None is the founders' fight.

• Gala v. pNetwork. Announced March 20, 2023, seeking $27.7 million over a November 2022 bridge exploit (Cointelegraph); we haven't verified how it ended.

• The Spider Tanks suit against Gamedia. Dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the Central District of California, per Blockchain Gamer (updated September 12, 2024).

• The May 2024 exploit. An attacker minted 5 billion GALA, sold about 600 million for roughly $21 million, then returned 5,913.2 ETH, about $22.5 million (The Block, May 21, 2024). Nothing we reviewed ties it to the founders' suit. We've also covered another unlimited-mint exploit.

• The August 18, 2026 incident. Gala's September 14, 2026 post says about 2 billion GALA left nine wallets and blames an "autonomous, AI-driven exploit agent." CryptoSlate put the drain at about $3 million on September 17, 2026, and noted the AI claim rests on evidence Gala hasn't released.

If you're holding GALA bags, none of this is a buy or sell signal. We think it says plenty about where control sits in web3 games, though.

Per the court's summary in the October 2023 order, Schiermeyer's own account is that GALA v2 "would render worthless" the tokens Thurston hadn't sold. Whoever turns out to be right, one company decision reissued the token and could change what holders' tokens were worth. That's the admin power our crypto-game tokenomics checklist tells you to hunt for before buying in.

Nodes, same lesson: after the company suspended True North's 7,000, the court's answer was damages later, not access now. Knowing how to check a smart contract before connecting your wallet won't make any game safe, but it shows who holds the keys. Separately, our guide to crypto game rug-pull red flags is a general due-diligence pointer, not a claim about Gala.

Three years into the Gala Games lawsuit, the public record has four denied emergency motions and zero verdicts. Gala keeps shipping while its founders keep litigating, and honestly, that could go on for a long while.