A decentralized application, often referred to as a “DApp,” is a type of software application that runs on a decentralized network, typically a blockchain, rather than being hosted on a centralized server. Think of it as a new way of creating apps, where no single entity controls the data or the backend operations.
How is a DApp Different from a Regular App?
To understand a DApp, let’s first look at how a regular app works. Most of the apps you use every day—like social media, banking or gaming—are centralized. This means they are controlled by a specific company that owns the servers where all the data is stored. If these servers go down, or if the company decides to change how the app works (or even shut it down), users have little to no control over what happens.
A DApp, on the other hand, is built on blockchain technology, which is a network of computers (nodes) that work together to ensure that data is stored across many locations, making it decentralized. Instead of a single company controlling everything, DApps’ operations and data are distributed across this network. This new approach has the potential to give users more control, transparency and security than ever before.
DApps are crucial in the web3 world because they embody the principles of decentralization, transparency and user empowerment. Unlike traditional apps, DApps can:
Be censorship-resistant: No single authority can block or censor a DApp, making it more resilient to external pressures.
Provide greater security: Since data is distributed across a blockchain, it’s easier to fortify the application against attacks that could compromise the system.
Ensure transparency: All transactions and operations are recorded on the blockchain, where they are publicly viewable and able to be verified by anyone.
Centralized vs. Decentralized Applications: Key Differences
Let’s break down the differences between centralized and decentralized apps to make this clearer:
Feature
Centralized App
Decentralized App (DApp)
Control
Controlled by a single entity (e.g., a company)
No single point of control; governed by code or community
Data Storage
Data stored on centralized servers owned by the company
Data stored across a decentralized network of nodes
Security
Vulnerable to hacks if the central server is compromised
More secure as data is spread across the blockchain
Censorship
Can be censored or altered by the controlling entity
Resistant to censorship; governed by smart contracts
Transparency
Operations and data are typically hidden from public view
Fully transparent; all operations are on the blockchain
Downtime
Can experience downtime if servers fail
Minimal downtime as it relies on a distributed network
Examples of DApps
Uniswap: A decentralized exchange that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies without relying on a central authority or paying fees to intermediaries.
Aave: A decentralized finance (DeFi) platform where users can lend and borrow cryptocurrencies without needing a bank or financial institution.
Rep.run: A decentralized social media platform built on GalaChain, designed to restore data ownership and control to users.
GalaChain was first built by a centralized company (Gala Games) in order to power its growing ecosystem of web3 entertainment through the core brands of Gala Games, Gala Music and Gala Film. But in a unique approach to web3 ecosystem building, GalaChain’s long-term plan was always to move its network toward full decentralization as it continued to grow.
GalaChain is a primary blockchain (layer 1) built to host not only its own platforms, but an entire universe of decentralized applications that can exist within unique channels (layer 2) that are part of the chain. Each of these channels and all their DApps are powered by GalaChain, but also contribute to the network’s increased scalability, supporting the tokenomics of $GALA and enhancing consumer use of the blockchain.
Imagine a long train that travels at astounding speeds, never stopping. Each train car is independently managed by its creator, containing whatever cargo (data) is required for its goals. No matter how many cars are added to the train, it continues carrying all cargo with ease. In fact, as more cars are added, the train can even gain stability and speed. The train is called GalaChain and the train cars are its channels.
2024 marks the year that GalaChain shifted from a proprietary blockchain for an entertainment company to an open blockchain upon which new developers can build as they please. With easy-to-access tools and creator resources, GalaChain is a perfect place for traditional tech innovators to “get their feet wet” with web3 tech.
Decentralized applications represent a significant shift in how we think about software, offering new possibilities for user control, transparency and security. As the web3 world continues to grow, DApps are set to play a crucial role in this decentralized digital future.
For years, the internet promised a world of free exchange, open platforms and limitless opportunities for users and businesses alike. But as the web2 era unfolded, it became clear that centralization had corrupted that vision.
Large social media companies grew into monopolizing forces, controlling not only the traffic on the internet but also how businesses and consumers interacted with it. In doing so, these corporations turned users into products, selling their attention and personal data to the highest bidder.
But the tides are shifting. As consumers grow wise to the pitfalls of web2’s highly centralized control, web3 is emerging to flip the script, creating a new era where users are empowered through ownership and rewards. GalaChain is building this decentralized future, and our newly released Decentralization White Paper lays out exactly how we plan to return control to the people.
The Corruption of Web2: How Centralization Stole the Internet
In the early days of Web2, platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter became the primary gateways to the internet. They offered free services—social networking, search engines, video sharing—that felt like the ultimate democratization of information. But there was a catch: these platforms were amassing unprecedented amounts of user data.
What began as simple tools to connect people soon evolved into sophisticated surveillance networks. Every click, like and search was tracked, collected and sold to advertisers. These companies turned our attention into the most valuable commodity, and they profited enormously. The internet, which was once open and free, became dominated by a few corporations who could undercut small businesses and charge whatever they wanted for advertising access to targeted audiences.
Even more troubling, users—without realizing it—became the products of the web2 era. Our personal data was collected, packaged and sold. This is why you now see hyper-personalized ads on social media—ads custom-tailored to your interests based on your digital footprint. While the convenience may seem like a benefit, its true costs are difficult to grasp.
Scratching the Surface: The Rise of Rewards and Loyalty Programs
As people became aware of how their attention and data were being monetized, companies began offering token rewards, like loyalty points or cash-back incentives, in an attempt to return a fraction of the value users had generated. These rewards programs, however, barely scratched the surface. While they provided small benefits, they didn’t address the fundamental issue: users were still at the mercy of centralized platforms that controlled the flow of information, access and value.
The monopoly of web2 companies meant that small businesses struggled to compete unless they could afford the rising costs of paid advertising in addition to all the costs of doing business. The internet, once seen as a level playing field, became tilted in favor of a few massive corporations.
Web3: Flipping the Script on Centralization
This is where web3 steps in. Web3 fundamentally reimagines how value is distributed in digital ecosystems by returning ownership and rewards directly to users, rather than filtering it through centralized middlemen. Powered by blockchain technology, Web3 empowers individuals to take control of their data, their interactions, and the value they create.
In the GalaChain ecosystem, we call this empowerment.
Through decentralization, we are building an ecosystem where users are not the product but the owners. In Web3, you can actually own your data, your digital assets and your interactions. Whether it’s through NFTs in gaming, ownership of digital content, or participation in decentralized applications (dApps), users can now become the beneficiaries of the value they generate.
GalaChain’s Vision: Empowering Users Through Decentralization
Our Decentralization White Paper marks a significant step in Gala Games’s mission to empower users by creating a decentralized, developer-first network. With GalaChain, we’re building a blockchain that is not only capable of handling the needs of the entertainment industry but can also scale to support developers from a wide range of sectors. More importantly, this decentralized system returns ownership and value directly to the users and developers who power it.
Here’s how Web3, and by extension GalaChain, flips the Web2 model on its head:
Ownership of Digital Assets: In Web3, users don’t just engage with platforms—they own pieces of them. This means everything from in-game assets in Gala Games to music rights in Gala Music can be fully owned, transferred, and monetized by users.
Rewards for Participation: Rather than collecting user data for profit, decentralized platforms like the GalaChain ecosystem reward users for their participation. Whether it’s node operators collecting $GALA tokens daily or players and creators benefiting from their contributions to the ecosystem, Web3 ensures that some sort of value flows back to the people who make it possible.
Decentralized Governance: In our new decentralized future, users also have a say in how the platforms evolve. GalaChain Improvement Proposals (GIPs) will allow the community to submit and vote on changes to the network, ensuring that no single entity has undue control.
The Future of Web3: Join Us on the Path to Decentralization
The power of Web3 lies in its ability to break free from the centralized control that has defined web2. We are no longer passive products in a corporate system—we are empowered participants in a decentralized network. At GalaChain, we’re excited to be at the forefront of this revolution. Our Decentralization White Paper outlines how we will build a more open, fair, and empowering ecosystem, and we invite you to join us on this journey.
The future is decentralized. It’s time to reclaim control over our digital lives.
🎂 Can you believe it’s already been two years of GalaChain!? 🎂
Happy Birthday GalaChain!
It was Autumn 2022. We were fresh out of the second Galaverse in Malta and there was A LOT going on around Gala Games. Gala Music was still young and Gala Film was totally new on the scene.
As tons of titles in Gala Games barrelled towards launch, it was clear we needed a better solution than Ethereum. Luckily we had a secret weapon about to launch in our pockets… GalaChain! Well, not exactly. At the time we were still calling it ‘Project GYRI’, but it was evolving fast. It wouldn’t be long before GalaChain was released to the world!
The first channels had been set up and tested, but the chain wasn’t live and actually supporting apps. That was all about to change though.
We did have some things running on a test chain before the launch. We first announced Project GYRI in early 2022 with the test game Town Crush. Eventually though, we’d head back to our roots and the finished chain became GalaChain
October 31st, 2022. Spider Tanks launch day. More than that, Spider Tanks is set to be the first game fully supported by GalaChain transactions. The asset bridge was opened before the game was launched and blocks started ticking through smoothly with transfers, bridges and token lock allowances.
At 3:58pm PT, it finally happened. Block 1586… a create match transaction! GalaChain was fully open and operational!
Behold! The first interactive, public, multi-party transaction on GalaChain!!!
Racing Forward
From those early blocks it wouldn’t be long before GalaChain grew bigger faster than we ever guessed it would.
Champions Arena soon leveraged GalaChain’s power. Common Ground World was revamped and redesigned to take full advantage of the chain. Within 6 months, nearly a dozen different apps were running on GalaChain!
It didn’t take long from there to see people outside the Gala Games community utilizing GalaChain to interact with the ecosystem. Even before the release of the GalaChain SDK in early 2024, NFT Harbor was already facilitating secure item exchanges on GalaChain. After the release of the SDK, however, things really took off!
GalaChain Into the Future
Today it’s hard to believe that GalaChain only released two years ago. Gala Games, Gala Music and Gala Film are of course still using the chain to create exciting experiences for users, but now we’re seeing development come from all over the world!
An attempt to list all the projects developing on GalaChain here would be folly. We talk about the new and exciting applications of GalaChain all the time, but we’re sometimes even surprised to see all the cool stuff being built on chain!
GalaChain growth is accelerating every day. More and more developers are coming to GalaChain for its capabilities, versatility and ability to scale. The chain has come a long way… and we’re nowhere near finished growing!
Come build with us — the next year is going to be even better!
Decentralization has always been a guiding principle for GalaChain, and we are now prepared to fully embrace this vision with the release of our Decentralization White Paper.
This marks a pivotal moment in GalaChain’s evolution—a shift from the necessary centralization we’ve relied on to scale our Layer 1 blockchain, toward a more decentralized and open ecosystem that invites developers and innovators from all industries to join us.
The Journey to Decentralization
When we embarked on the creation of GalaChain, centralization was essential. It allowed us to build a robust, scalable infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of external developers from gaming, music and film, while also ensuring the chain could handle immense transaction volumes without compromising performance. However, we have always viewed centralization as a temporary phase.
Now, having achieved the scalability and efficiency needed to support not just Gala Games but a vast array of industries, we are ready to embark on our decentralization roadmap.
With the help of the Hyperledger Fabric upon which the chain was built, GalaChain is moving decisively into the next phase of its development. The Decentralization White Paper lays out a four-phase roadmap that will shift GalaChain’s consensus from Raft to Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), integrate our vast Founder’s Node network into the core of the blockchain, and implement a GalaChain Improvement Proposal (GIP) system for a greater degree of community-driven governance.
Why Decentralization Matters
Decentralization is not just about technology; it is about empowerment and freedom. In its fully decentralized form, GalaChain will no longer rely on a centralized authority to validate transactions, ensuring greater security, fault tolerance and global distribution of decision-making power. This shift allows us to create a trustless system, where participants from any region or industry can contribute to the governance and growth of the network without the need for middlemen.
By decentralizing, we are also enabling a future where developers and creators have more control over their projects, from smart contracts to operational governance, and ultimately, the value they create. This creates a developer-first universe on GalaChain, opening doors to countless industries beyond entertainment—whether that’s finance, healthcare, supply chain management or beyond. The possibilities are endless.
The Four-Phase Plan
Our roadmap outlines a deliberate, four-phase plan to decentralize GalaChain:
Phase 1: Migration to Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), ensuring better security, fault tolerance, and decentralization without sacrificing GalaChain’s transaction throughput of up to 1500 TPS.
Phase 2: Global distribution of nodes and orderers, optimizing the network for speed, security, and fault tolerance through a geographically diverse network of peers.
Phase 3: Integration with Gala Founder’s Nodes, which will take on a more central role in transaction validation and consensus participation.
Phase 4: Implementation of a GalaChain Improvement Proposal (GIP) system to enable decentralized governance, giving stakeholders the power to submit and vote on network changes.
What This Means for the Future
For GalaChain, this evolution signifies much more than a technical upgrade—it’s a declaration of our commitment to open innovation. No longer confined by the traditional bounds of centralized brands and interests, GalaChain’s decentralized infrastructure will foster an ecosystem that is truly borderless, inclusive and industry-agnostic.
The decentralized universe of GalaChain is ready to welcome industries and developers from across the globe. As GalaChain evolves, so too does our community, and together we are building the future of decentralized innovation.
Have you heard of OSMI? There are so many projects building on GalaChain that we occasionally have trouble shining a light on all of them, but OSMI is one you definitely want to keep an eye out for!
OSMI is a new AI project built directly on GalaChain. Unlike other AI projects, OSMI is entirely decentralized and will be run through a collection of GPU-based Nodes.
While specific AI is becoming more and more ubiquitous in our world, it’s not necessarily becoming more public, transparent and decentralized. As AI continues to influence our culture and create a new paradigm for how the human race develops, centralization carries a menacing undertone.
OSMI takes the controls of AI out of the few and puts it in the hands of the many. The result will be that OSMI develops and works for people the way they want it to, rather than the way some boss in an ivory tower wants it to.
Why Decentralization Matters
Culture itself is decentralized. A small group of people don’t get together and decide how humanity’s collective consciousness and ideas change over time — that’s all about as decentralized as it gets. Individual attitudes progress and change by the infinitely complex interchange of ideas.
AI, however, is often incredibly centralized. An individual or a small group is determining the parameters, the training data, the goals, etc. This kind of centralization may give normal people some advantage, but the individuals that created it are really controlling where it goes and how it develops.
Now that AI is working its way more and more into daily life, AI’s development will affect the evolution of culture. Centralized AI homogeneity then potentially threatens to partially centralize the evolution of our culture.
The power this gives an irresponsible small group is terrifying, but even more terrifying is the cultural stagnation this could lead to overall. If the same AI models created and curated by just a few people are pushing us all to the same way of thinking, how will diversity of thought continue to thrive and lead to innovation?
The OSMI Movement
OSMI was created for a better way to navigate AI. Just as we propel culture collectively faster than any small group or individual could, we could work together to make AI a better tool that doesn’t fall victim to homogeneity and profit motives.
Decentralization isn’t just a gimmick of OSMI… it’s the entire point. The OSMI team feels that this is THE sustainable way forward with AI and that this is the beginning a very important shift in society towards better AI tools.
Keep an eye out for Node sale announcements coming up and to learn more about the $OSMI token. We’re incredibly excited to learn more about this project and see what the OSMI team can do to revolutionize how we interact with AI!
It wasn’t too terribly long ago that GalaChain’s token footprint was just a few ERC-20s. With the breakout of public development on GalaChain, however, tons of new fungible tokens have joined the Gala Ecosystem!
With so many tokens, it can be easy to get turned around. We thought it was high time that we run through all of the fungible tokens on GalaChain’s platforms and let you know exactly how you can get your hands on some of those rewards!
Please note that we have missed many tokens here. We’ve left out tokens from the Project Token Creation Tool for the moment, preferring to focus today on the tokens that are on boarded onto the GalaChain platform itself. We’ve also left out any tokens without a clear path to rewards.
In the future, we’ll probably do another version of this list with all the off-platform tokens that offer a great chance for rewards! But, that’s another day. For now, enjoy this full guide of where to grab all those great token rewards in the GalaChain Ecosystem!
Legends Reborn
$TOLK: Leaderboard placement at the end of each season awards $TOLK, proportionate to the amount spent in the game during the season’s duration.
$ETIME: Players receive $ETIME daily based on their daily prize points from the previous day, as well as at the end of the season based on their placement in Battle Power, Arena Rank and Conquest Rank. Rewards are proportional to the amount spent in the game, with 60% going towards season rewards and 40% going towards daily rewards
$STAMINA: Each season players may create a limited amount of $STAMINA tokens using 100 of their own stamina in game. These may then be transferred or used to receive 100 stamina through the Gala Games Store.
$SOIL is awarded to players for a wide variety of activities in Common Ground World. Completing daily challenges and racking up Town Points using reward-eligible NFTs, logging in during the day while operating a Common Ground World Node to minimum uptime, or placing in a competition leaderboard will all get you some $SOIL allocation.
NOTE: $DIRT is the off-chain version of $SOIL, and will soon be migrated to $SOIL.
$GALA is awarded every arena season based on each player’s acquired Victory Points. Victory Points are acquired from each victory, based on the number of NFT Champions used in the battle.
$GALA is awarded daily to each player based on the Legacy Tickets that they hold from the previous day’s competitions. The amount of $GALA rewards are proportional to the amount spent in the game during the past day.
$GALA is awarded each day proportional to the amount players have spent on the game. This reward is allocated to all players based on the Stardust that they hold, with half their Stardust being burned each day and replaced with the appropriate amount of $GALA allowance.
$GALA is awarded each week through the Gala Leaderboard based on a player’s final position. Points are acquired by participating in the normal weekly event while using an NFT Hero on your team, with more points for using more than one NFT Hero.
$VGX is distributed based on each player’s V Points, which are achieved by completing tasks in the season pass. Note that $VGX rewards are delivered through a user’s RFLXT account, not the Gala platform.
In Last Expedition, only one team makes it out alive. That means the winning team gets to harvest the resources while the rest are stranded on the planet with theirs. There are four fungible tokens that a user can acquire playing Last Expedition.
$LECHAR is awarded each time a player gains enough XP for a new rank. These can be used to unlock new characters in Last Expedition
Each of the following is a tokenized version of one of the resources you can find on Aura. These are occasionally used to buy new skins and other features that are intermittently available on the Gala Store:
$LEMIN, or Last Expedition Minerals,are awarded based on the amount of minerals you manage to get off the planet!
$LECC, or Last Expedition Core Chunks, are awarded based on the amount of core chunks you manage to get off the planet!
$LEFC , or Last Expedition Fragment Chunks, are awarded based on the amount of fragment chunks you manage to get off the planet!
