Shrapnel's “buyout” by the CCP is followed by migrating to Gala?

GAMING CHRONICLES 130

Raiden

and

Memento

Jul 30, 2025

Gaming Chronicles focuses on curating the latest crypto gaming news every week.

You will find the latest news, educational content, and game reviews.

TLDR :

Youmio migrates to Avalanche
Shrapnel moves to Gala?
Pixel Vault is shutting down

🗞️ NEWS

YOUMIO MIGRATES TO AVALANCHE

Youmio announced it will migrate to its own L1 on Avalanche last week, “building the future of AI infrastructure”
- The company aims to become the world’s leading agent chain by introducing infrastructure for autonomous agents
  - “Youmio provides open infrastructure where agents act transparently, with identity, memory, and provenance onchain, and privacy controls in the hands of users.” ~ Michael O’Connor,
- Each agent will have a wallet, modular skills, and an evolving metadata state
- The first app on the chain is Youmio Agents, a launchpad for 3D AI characters that can live across games, apps, and digital worlds
To accelerate the development of their ecosystem, Michael joined the investment committee of InfraBUIDL(AI), the $15M builder program from the Avalanche Foundation
In a post, Michael shared why they’re building an L1 agent chain:
- He says that LLMs can’t reliably tell who is prompting. This opens up risks for malicious (hidden) prompts. As in, users can trick agents into doing things they shouldn’t
- The problem is then exacerbated if agents deal with sensitive data. Only, guardrails aren’t a 100% fail-safe
  - As a solution, Youmio will introduce public infrastructure that makes an agent’s behavior transparent and verifiable, so trustworthy agents can be integrated in critical environments
- Lastly, he adds that the testnet will launch in August
Regarding its launchpad, Youmio stands out (great video from Shash) because it doesn’t only focus on distribution (like Virtuals largely does). Youmio’s moat will be its tech, offering extensive 3D capabilities and agent security
- Shash sees use cases such as next-gen DeFi AI usage through more interactive prompting. Brand and IP tie-ins. Virtual assistant agents. And influencers
- Grail sees “NPCs who can interact with crypto in and out of game worlds onchain via the Layer1”
  - To add, he also argues how the tech coming out of platforms like Virtuals has been largely disappointing. The vast majority lacks any type of novelty or meaningful purpose, and only succeeds based on speculation
Youmio started as Today the Game, a Sims-style video game. The game served as the foundation for their tech, which they are now leveraging to build their infrastructure and grow into an ecosystem through its own L1

SHRAPNEL MOVES TO GALA CHAIN?

After Shrapnel’s “buyout” by the Chinese government last April, the game is now migrating from Avalanche to Gala Games to “secure access to China's Trusted Copyright Chain” (TCC)
- According to the announcement, this makes Gala Games the first non-Chinese blockchain to collaborate with the TCC. The full public launch of Gala’s integration with the TCC is scheduled for Q1 2026
  - The “bridge” is mentioned to open a regulatory compliant path to ~600 million Chinese gamers, so who knows if Gala could see a second awakening. Crypto remains a heavily regulated area in China
  - The Chinese platform officially launched in 2021 to provide various services to copyright holders
- Gala states that Shrapnel will reserve a portion of their Chinese revenue (up to 10%) to periodically repurchase $SHRAP tokens
- Furthermore, they have built an invitation system for Chinese content creators, including wallet tracking, badge claims, playtest entries, and “invitation NFTs”
  - They’re releasing a commemorative Bridge Badge NFT that will be airdropped to all Gala wallets and Neon (Shrapnel’s Chinese name?) players
Kate Irwin covered Shrapnel’s shenanigans in her piece published in April:
- Highlights include a $2 - $3.5M monthly burn rate, a total of $86.9M in operating expenses, and ex-leadership aggressively selling tokens
- Kearney shares his controversial opinion on how this move to Gala is bullish for Shrapnel and their new leadership
In terms of Gala Games, the company was founded in 2019 by the co-founder of Zynga. The first game it launched was called Town Star, a P2E farming simulator, and in 2020, it launched the GALA token
- In 2021, the company partnered with C2 Ventures to launch a $100M gaming fund. That same year, it announced Project GYRI (later named Gala Chain)
- During the following years, Gala developed its chain, started publishing third-party games, and launched “Gala Music” and “Gala Movies”, among other things
Other games popular on the chain were Mirandus, Spider Tanks, and The Walking Dead: Empires
- Gala Games sued Spider Tanks at some point, but the case was dismissed. The Walking Dead: Empires was also a huge flop, which is shutting down tomorrow (by chance). This was announced back in May
  - Overall, Gala was also known for using predatory NFT sale models for the games it published
Jesus Martinez, one of Gala’s largest former ambassadors, commented on the Shrapnel announcement (context: the split between them wasn’t pretty)
- Claiming that the chain shut down or replaced studios on the chain with “corpse teams”, and screwed over node holders, among other questionable things
Overall, both Shrapnel (the old team) and Gala have some “dirty laundry”. Yet, it’s interesting to see them bridge to China’s enormous gaming market

PIXEL VAULT WINDS DOWN, WHERE’S GFUNK?

After 4 years of building, Pixel Vault (PV) announced that they started the process of “potentially winding down” their ecosystem last week
- In the message, they shared that they are in discussions with several parties interested in acquiring PV and various assets, including Wolf Game
  - The initial plan of Seedphrase acquiring Wolf Game is still on the table. It does seem unlikely that Beanie’s offer (of $1) to acquire PV and launch a crypto-based comic is happening
Amid the PV shutdown, GFunk (understandably) caught a lot of heat:
- Firstly, there’s the Crypto Punk auction. The TL:DR is that Pixel Vault held 16 PUNKS for a while (fractionally owned by the community), they auctioned them off on June 2nd (swapping $PUNK → $GG), with promises of using the proceeds for the $GG ecosystem, gamesdotfun, rewarding players, and the developers
  - However, GFunk claimed all the ETH from the auction himself, sent the funds to ByBit, and then lost it all during leverage trading, according to John. Here’s a more complete thread that breaks it down
- Furthermore, Pixel Vault raised a total of $100M in funding from Adam Bain and Dick Costolo’s 01 Advisors and Velvet Sea Ventures (plus, not to forget community-raised money)
  - Over the years, many attempts were made to create a real business, but in the end, they have little, or almost 0, to show for it
    - They couldn’t save Wolf Game, Battle Plan failed, and the comic idea didn’t see any success, among other things
  - It also begs the question, where all the money went, because the company’s burn rate couldn’t have been that significant. Gfunk himself claims that none of the $100M raised went to Pixel Vault
About a month ago, “2.0”, a community that rolled out of the cracks of PV’s failure, posted a thread that details how the funds were allocated over the years
Since the “Bybit incident,” we haven’t heard or seen of GFunk, and he is no longer the CEO. Overall, the result of PV shutting down seems to be a cluster of pressure on the founder, poor business decisions, various “attempts”, with a final extraction event
- Will Wolf Game and other PV assets see a new life? Let’s hope so…