Time flies when you’re defying fate, and Mercenaries, it’s time to set your clocks again! Season 2 of Eternal Paradox started less than 2 weeks ago on January 24th, bringing with it a whirlwind of fresh content, powerful heroes, and legendary rewards. Gear up and get ready, because there’s still plenty of time this season to turn the tides of fate for the good guys!
For this next issue of “Latest and Greatest” we’re featuring Eternal Paradox and some of the latest excitement from the magically charged land of Elysium.
This game is a brilliant fusion of 4x and RPG battle mechanics, a well balanced combination of competitive PvP action and narrative-driven PvE, repeating every 49 days in a paradoxical time loop of legendary proportions. The stakes could not be higher!
Learn more about ETIME rewards and the Eternal Paradox economy in the Litepaper.
Start playing now on your favorite mobile device: Android | iOS Don’t forget to leave a review in the app stores!
Meet Akari
This enigmatic new mercenary joins the fray, blades flashing and secrets swirling. Watch her dominate the battlefield with breathtaking agility and lethal grace. Even though time repeats in the Eternal Paradox, you never know what might happen, so prepare your summons and get ready to bolster the ranks!
Play with the Team
On February 6th, members of the Gala team got together to hit the Eternal Paradox themselves on the latest edition of our live show, Gala Plays! Get some great game tips and a taste of the adventure in the Paradox by watching the replay below:
Mercenary Tomes
Mercenary Tomes are currently available in the Eternal Paradox store, each one allowing you to summon a minted Mercenary of any rarity, Rare or better. The Nature’s Fury Mercenary Tome gives you an unparalleled 6% shot at one of 4 different Legendary Mercs: Torsten, Emma, Ekon or Zahra. You’ll even have a combined 2% chance to get one of the same Mercs in the coveted Ancient rarity! The best part… Nature’s Fury Mercenary Tomes are 34% off for a limited time, available for purchase by credit card, GALA, ETH or ETIME!
We’re pouring time and magic into crafting thrilling new ways to use your precious ETIME. Snag an Ancient ★7 (Wind Type) while you can, a legendary warrior whose power can turn the tide of any battle. Keep your eyes peeled for more ETIME treasures to come!
Power up your Fortress with another exclusive ETIME sink available now in limited supply: Fortress of the Wild. This Skin is a one-time purchase for ETIME only–it doesn’t expire at the end of the season and your enemies will tremble in fear. Additionally, because this item is connected to the Breath of the Wild tribe, your Mercenaries within that tribe will get some valuable buffs when you play with this skin!
Stay tuned for more news and revelations as the end of the season approaches. Mercenaries, destiny awaits! Sharpen your blades, hone your skills, and prepare to defy fate once again. The Eternal Paradox beckons!
You may have recently heard rumors about how Gala Founder’s Nodes constitute a large portion of the decentralized internet and IPFS. It is true that our Founder’s Nodes make up nearly 30% of the most active stable peers in the IPFS Distributed Hash Table (DHT), but that is only the beginning of the story. The Gala Founder’s Node ecosystem, with almost 24,000 DHT servers online, represents a massive contribution to decentralized storage and computing, powering the largest share of any single network contributing to IPFS today!
In this blog, we’d like to shed some more light on how this fact was realized, involving a coincidental misconfiguration over a year ago that shed light on the actual portion of the decentralized internet that was powered by Gala nodes.
We think that this is an incredibly interesting story about the resilience and security of decentralized networks, and one that is especially relevant today as we prepare to onboard greater numbers than ever before to our sustainable and capable L1 blockchain, GalaChain. But first, let’s talk a little about IPFS and the role that Gala Founder’s Nodes play in supporting the very existence of the decentralized internet protocol known as the InterPlanetary File System.
We want our non-tech-genius followers to understand and appreciate the significance of this story, so we’ll try to keep it simple as we explain. But feel free to check out THIS ARTICLE from Probelab.io for a more in-depth approach with more charts and data.
What is IPFS?
The InterPlanetary File System is a web3 internet protocol that began in 2015, designed to decentralize and democratize ownership of content on the internet.
In simpler terms, it is a solution for the storing and sharing of files, a decentralized answer to cloud-style storage.
Instead of uploading files to specific servers, they’re broken into small chunks and scattered across many computers around the world. Each chunk gets a unique fingerprint called a CID, like a personalized code.
To access a file, all that is needed is its CID. A special network called the DHT (like a giant, decentralized phone book) helps users locate the computers with specific chunks. Finally, the chunks are downloaded from those computers and pieced back together.
The DHT is maintained by nodes from the various peer networks of IPFS, like expert operators who are able to quickly look up and retrieve encrypted data from IPFS. Think of Gala Founder’s Nodes as some of the best information operators in the game, with enough storage capacity and bandwidth to ensure that the most important files are always accessible, anywhere online.
Illuminating Mishap
In January of 2023, a slight misconfiguration of Gala Founder’s Nodes in IPFS’s libp2p resource manager caused Gala Founder’s Nodes to become unresponsive within the IPFS network for a short time. The downtime was only a matter of a couple hours, but the number of unresponsive nodes was so impactful on the total number of network nodes that more research into the issue was warranted by IPFS.
Because they knew (because of the misconfiguration) that the unresponsive Nodes during that time were in fact Gala Founder’s Nodes, IPFS was afforded a rare opportunity for what was essentially a snapshot showing the portion of Gala Founder’s Nodes from the entire pool of DHT server nodes.
In THIS ARTICLE from the IPFS blog, the unresponsive node mishap (pictured above) was described, along with the solution that was quickly implemented.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this incident was that even with about 60% of its nodes unresponsive, the DHT was still able to deliver content as intended, keeping IPFS running, just a little slower than normal. This is a testament to the power of the decentralized internet, where software can be updated on the fly across multiple distributed node networks without negatively affecting the performance of IPFS.
Uncovering Gala’s Role
Because of the intrinsic encrypted security of decentralized networks, it can be difficult to draw specific information about where support is coming from. However, in this situation, the technicians at Interplanetary Shipyard were able to draw some interesting results from the data. They were even nice enough to share them with us when we asked for a quote in early February of 2024:
“Our latest numbers say that 5321 out of 20093 peers that appeared online the past week (have been online for 80% of time or more), have been Gala peers. That makes for more than 26% of the network. I’m sure there are more Gala peers in the network and that the IPFS network has more peers too, it’s just that these are the most stable ones.” – Yiannis Psaras, IPFS Shipyard
It’s worth noting that we have a lot more than 5321 Nodes running every day. This number is only the most active Nodes in the ecosystem, and it still makes up a MASSIVE portion of the total peers on the network. There are tens of thousands of other nodes running in the Founder’s Node Network as well, showing how much further we could flex together if we needed to.
Thanks to Probelab
We’d like to especially thank Yiannis Psaras (quoted above) and Dennis Trautwein from Probelab, who have assisted us with this data. Probelab is one of the largest contributors to IPFS Shipyard, a collection of open source projects created and maintained by members of the IPFS community.
Probelab is a Benchmarking and Optimization Team “on a mission to measure the performance of Web3.0 network protocols, benchmark protocols against target performance milestones and propose improvements to their core design principles.” (from the Probelab introduction)
These folks are heroes of the decentralized era whose work is always needed but rarely seen. Thank you so much for all your great work in web3’s foundations!
We’re downright proud that our Founder’s Nodes make up such a large portion of the DHT server nodes. Still we may be even prouder that when those Nodes were down, the decentralized internet kept right on going and didn’t miss a beat.
It feels like just yesterday that Common Ground World was born, a web3 ownership enabled prototype called Town Star, created by some of the same genius minds that brought the world the Farmville franchise. Gala Games grew from an innovative startup to a global leader in web3 entertainment while this game kept growing all the while.
For the first issue of a new quarterly update series about each of our awesome games, Common Ground World was the perfect choice. Now let’s dig into some of the latest and greatest excitement for everyone’s favorite farming sim from Gala Games!
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Coming Soon for Common Ground World Nodes
In a massive step toward player empowerment and decentralization, Common Ground World Node licenses will soon be tokenized and minted on GalaChain, allowing owners to transfer and trade them as they please. Stay tuned for more updates on CGW Nodes!
Guilds are coming soon to CGW Nodes, currently on track for release before the end of Q1.
Later This Year
Later this year, Daily Challenges are making a triumphant return with a new and improved reward system. Look for more updates about that in the near future!
Thanks to the power and versatility of Gala’s L1 blockchain, GalaChain, Upgradeable NFTs are coming soon to Common Ground World, adding a new layer of strategic planning for collectors!
If those on the horizon updates weren’t enough, we’ll sweeten the anticipation by mentioning Consumable Boosts, joining the game later this year!
New Competition
This week’s competition runs 2/6 at 9am PT through 2/9 at 9am PT. For a powerful Star boost, players will be scrambling in their Stationary Shops to craft and sell Red Envelopes!
Weekly Town Hall
Join members of the Common Ground World team for a weekly live get together on the Gala Games Youtube channel, every Friday from 8-9am PT. Join the fun to get all the latest in the CGW community straight from the team, and to get your questions answered.
Check out last week’s CGW Town Hall through the link and don’t miss the new one this Friday morning!
Unfolding Fortune
The latest Common Ground World competition (found here in its entirety) is a fortunate one. In honor of Lunar New Year 2024, kicking off the year of the Dragon, CGW players are turning paper into symbols of fortune and luck by crafting and selling Red Envelopes for a substantial Star boost!
New NFTs
Every week, the Common Ground World team is dropping new limited NFT items in the CGW store. This week the hot new item is the Legendary Lantern Festival, pictured below.
Immerse yourself in the festive spirit with the all-new Lantern Festival NFT – a celebration of Lunar New Year that brings prosperity and joy!
Placement of this Legendary item quickens the pace of your Stationary Shop workers while cutting the production time in half for Bamboo Shoots and Red Envelopes, giving you a gameplay edge in the current competition. Get yours HERE.
