Off The Grid NFT Ownership: What You Actually Get to Keep

Start with the naming, because the naming is genuinely bad and it causes most of the confusion.

GUNZ is the blockchain. As Decrypt's own explainer puts it, GUNZ is the Layer-1 network itself, while GUN is the cryptocurrency token that operates on that network. It runs as a custom Avalanche subnet, which is the "Off The Grid Avalanche" thing you see referenced everywhere without anyone bothering to explain it. In practice it's the ledger your items live on, and you never touch it directly.

GUN is the money. Fixed supply of 10 billion tokens, per CoinMarketCap's breakdown (page dated September 2 2026), which also notes a Solana deployment added through a LayerZero bridge in July 2025. GUN buys items, pays for subscriptions and covers gas. It's fungible: one GUN is every other GUN, the same way one dollar is every other dollar. Holding GUN never means you own a specific thing.

Your gear is the actual Off The Grid NFT layer. Weapons, skins, attachments, the stuff you scrape off the map. Each one gets tracked separately. Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen described the loot system as one where "each item has a unique code, and it seems there's a finite amount available."

That split sounds pedantic right up until you notice nobody draws it. Wikipedia's article on the game blurs the two. Most crypto-press coverage assumes you already know. And it matters, because "the token pumped" and "my rig is worth something" are unrelated statements that people treat as the same sentence.

GUN token vs NFT gear, side by side

One small tell about how bad the naming is: that Steam reviewer, writing in July 2025, says "GUNZ" when they mean the token. Everyone does this. It shows up in search too. Type "Off The Grid game crypto" and you'll get GUN price trackers mixed in with actual gameplay guides, because nothing on the results page tells you which one you meant. The chain and the currency have almost the same name and nobody at Gunzilla appears to have thought that through.

The Hex and the node

Per PCGamesN's reporting, updated October 11 2024, you find loot containers in-match called Hexs. Taking one to an in-world "node" verifies that the Hex is genuine and assigns "a unique virtual signature to every item contained within, thus minting them as legitimate NFTs."

Read that again, because it's the bit Gunzilla's "optional NFT element" line skips right past. Minting isn't a menu you can ignore. It happens as part of picking up loot.

Later sources describe Hexes being "decoded" rather than validated at a node, so the wording has drifted across the game's rollout. Same shape either way: loot container in, on-chain item out.

Worth flagging so old threads don't confuse you. Those nodes are themselves a separate NFT class. PCGamesN reports that roughly 10,000 of them were sold to early backers around 2022 for about $2,000 each, and node owners take a cut of the transaction fees whenever a player processes a Hex through their node. Node NFTs are infrastructure. They have nothing to do with your gear, and people conflate the two constantly, which is how you end up reading a thread about "Gunzilla Games NFT prices" that turns out to be about validator hardware.

The export gate, and how it moved

Here's where "you own it" picks up its first asterisk.

When export to OpenSea first went live, access was "restricted to July 2024 OTG Pro Subscribers," according to games.gg's report from July 24 2025. Not Pro Subscribers in general. That specific cohort. The same piece notes that importing a purchased item back into the game requires Mainnet PC players to "complete KYC."

By January 2026 the framing had loosened. w3gamer's coverage from January 20 2026 describes the requirement more broadly as buying a battle pass in order to sell items on the marketplace. So the gate appears to have gone from a one-time eligibility window to an ongoing purchase, at least as reported. As far as I can tell, nobody has connected those two dated snapshots before, which tells you how little attention this system gets from anyone who doesn't already hold something in it.

My read: neither report is safe to treat as today's exact rule, and you should check the live terms before planning around either. What both establish, and this is the durable part, is that selling an Off The Grid NFT has never been free. There has always been something you had to buy first.

If the wallet half of this is the fuzzy part for you, our crypto game wallets explainer is the background reading on what a KYC-gated import actually implies about custody.

Four things, and they are nowhere near equally solid.

• Resale rights are real. Strongest leg by far. When Phase 1 export opened, skin sale volume on OpenSea came in "just shy of $30,000" inside 24 hours, per Decrypt on July 25 2025, with the highest single sale a Tacoma Pioneer gun skin at 55,300 GUN, roughly $1,688. Kotaku's Zwiezen reported looting a rare arm and selling it "for 60 GUN... to another player." Tiny trade. But it's a journalist documenting the mechanic working, rather than a marketing page promising that it will. Bigger numbers turned up once mainnet trading opened. cryptonews.com.au reported a Prankster vest clearing roughly $2,393, a ZipperMouth mask at about $1,100, a Convict rig above $500, two Prankster Woodpecker guns at $600 and $570, and a pair of Prankster shades at $467, all sourced from the community-run OTG DegenRadar tracker. Community tracker, not audited data. Weigh it accordingly.

• Portability is real, but your platform decides. This one honestly surprised me. Zwiezen, playing on Xbox Series X/S, noted he didn't "actually have access to my GUNZ Wallet or the GUN tokens inside it," because "Xbox, PlayStation, and Valve won't allow Gunzilla to tie the actual blockchain into the game." So the item sits on-chain either way. Whether you can reach it depends on which box you're playing on. That's a properly strange ownership model and almost nobody mentions it.

• Persistence is the shaky one. Items have survived a network migration, which is more than plenty of web3 games can say. But "on-chain" and "playable forever" are not the same claim, and nobody has an honest answer for what your Prankster vest does if Gunzilla stops paying for servers. You'd hold a token pointing at art on a chain with no game attached to it. We went at that exact question in our piece on soulbound tokens and whether you really own your crypto deck, and the answer there transfers: a chain records who holds the thing, never whether the thing still does anything.

• Re-entry comes with a paperwork tax. That KYC requirement games.gg flagged in July 2025 means buying an Off The Grid NFT on the open market and then using it in-game is not a one-click move for Mainnet PC players. Buying is easy. Using what you bought is where the friction lives.

Separate channels, and they carry wildly different risk.

• The official Off The Grid marketplace is the simplest path. GUN-denominated, inside the game, no external account needed. Also the most opaque of the three, and the one Steam reviewers go after hardest.

• OpenSea opens the widest buyer pool for an Off The Grid NFT, anyone with a wallet, which is the only reason those Phase 1 numbers happened at all. Gated by the subscription tier at launch per games.gg (July 24 2025), then by the battle-pass requirement w3gamer described in January 2026, plus KYC if you want to bring a purchase back into the game.

• Then there's the unofficial market, and this part is genuinely wild. Decrypt's Ryan S. Gladwin documented a pre-market economy running inside clan Discord servers on March 8 2025, ahead of full on-chain trading. Players "spamming the chat with messages like 'Want to buy GUN tokens with USD.'" Bundles moving at "$4 to $10" per 1,000 GUN tokens. One Pioneer Tacoma skin listed at "$1K USD." One trader claiming "almost $1,500" in Solana for a full Pioneer set. Reported whale account offers in the "$50,000 to $60,000" range. Gladwin's piece notes all of it ran against the game's terms of service, and describes the "dance of risk and trust" involved.

Which is a polite way of saying no escrow, no recourse, and your counterparty is a Discord handle. Ape in if you want. Just be honest with yourself about what you're doing.

Both sides have real evidence and I'm not going to pretend one of them wins clean.

The case that it's real. OpenSea's own blog, on February 20 2025, put the GUNZ chain at "over 13 million wallets, over 370 million in total transactions, and averaging 2.5 million transactions per day," and noted the game passed "over 1 million hours viewed on Twitch in the first three days of early access." By January 2026, an official GUNZ announcement reported by w3gamer on January 20 2026 claimed the chain had "surpasse[d] 20 million NFT trades on OpenSea," with the Off The Grid OpenSea collection listing "over 21 million items available for trading" and Avalanche explorer data showing a recent peak "at over 22,000 daily active unique wallets." Company-reported milestone, so discount it some. The Decrypt sale figures are on-chain and independently reported though, and real dollars moved for pixel rigs. That isn't nothing.

The case that it's hype. Kotaku's verdict was "An Okay Shooter Buried In NFTs," and it came from a reviewer who had personally documented the resale mechanic working. He wasn't dismissing it out of ignorance, which makes that headline land harder than the usual gaming-press NFT eyeroll. A Steam Community review posted in July 2025 put the pay-to-win side bluntly: "As a free-to-play player, when you are winning, you get 5 or 6 times lower GUNZ than a PRO player," and a paid membership is "a must if you want to feel that you are progressing." That same reviewer also alleged Gunzilla was review botting its own Steam page, which is unverified, and I'm flagging it as an allegation rather than repeating it as fact.

Read that complaint again. Nobody's afraid of NFTs. They're mad that a paid tier controls the earn rate, the oldest problem in this whole genre, wearing a blockchain costume. Our breakdown of how play to earn actually works in 2026 covers why that structure keeps reappearing under new branding.

And then there's Gunzilla's FAQ, which is the thing that bugs me most about the Off The Grid web3 story. "It's entirely up to the player how they want to play the game," it says. Then it stops. No blockchain explanation. Nothing on the GUNZ Wallet, the export flow, or the subscription gate. One sentence, and the page moves on to something else. For a system where minting happens automatically while you loot, per PCGamesN, "optional" is carrying an awful lot of weight.

Where I land. Mechanically real, meaningfully gated. Your Off The Grid NFT gear is a genuine on-chain asset with a working secondary market and dated dollar prices attached to it, and that puts it ahead of most things in this space that call themselves ownership. You also cannot sell it without buying something first, cannot reach your wallet on some platforms, cannot re-import a purchase without KYC, and cannot get a straight explanation of any of that from the people who built it.

That's not a rug. It's also not the frictionless ownership the letters "NFT" are supposed to promise. If you read terms of service before clicking accept, you'll be fine here. If you were hoping to loot a skin and flip it before dinner, go read the gate rules first.

Worth reading next to this one: our rundown of what happens when early access ends in October 2026, which takes the GUNZ token and timeline side rather than the gear side.