How to Buy Gala (GALA) in Canada

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robertstevens

Robert has reported for a variety of international publications including the Associated Press, The Guardian, Vice, and Decrypt. Current areas of interest include the political economy of technology, cryptocurrencies, and privacy. Robert has a Bachelor of Science from UCL, and a Master's degree from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.

GALA is a cryptocurrency token that sits at the center of a crypto gaming platform called Gala Games. Crypto gaming platforms revolve around the concept of “play-to-earn,” a new genre of gaming that rewards you with cryptocurrencies for playing video games.

For some, earning money for playing video games is a dream come true, while others balk at the idea of financializing a pastime with crypto. Whichever side of the fence you fall, you can’t deny the popularity of play-to-earn tokens. GALA’s one of several that soared in value in 2021; others include Axie Infinity’s AXS token, Enjin’s ENJ, and NFT projects like NBA Top Shot.

The GALA token launched in 2020. It distinguishes itself from its fierce play-to-earn competition by focusing on servicing you with “games you’ll actually want to play,” and moving the industry away from pay-to-win games, games that charge you for every little feature, and games that are bogged down by slow blockchain databases.

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Gala Games’s CEO is Eric Schiermeyer, the co-founder of Zynga. Schiermeyer’s old company popularized microtransactions in video games in the 2010s with games like Words with Friends and Farmville. Unlike those games, you get to keep everything you earn in a Gala Games videogame as an NFT, or non-fungible token—the same tech that backs crypto art.

As of March 2022, just one game on the Gala Games store is playable. It’s called Town Star: think Farmville but with NFTs. It even features many of the same mechanics, like real-time waiting periods for the construction of buildings. The major difference is that by placing NFTs in your in-game town—items, essentially—you also earn a coin called TownCoin. Top players are also rewarded in GALA coins.

All of the other games incorporate tokenomics into their design, and they’re all free to play. GALA is the token that links all of these videogame markets together; it’s an intermediary currency used for peer-to-peer payments and to trade in-game items.

You can also run a “node” on Gala with your home computer—this costs 372,002 GALA tokens, or about $95,000. It’s a license, basically, one that grants you influence over the future of the development of the network and entitles you to receive extra GALA tokens, NFT, and merch.

How to buy GALA

There are two major ways to buy the Gala crypto. The first is to buy GALA on a centralized exchange or brokerage, and the second is to buy it on a decentralized exchange on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain. (A third way, unique to the GALA ecosystem, is to earn GALA tokens by playing games on Gala Games or selling in-game assets for GALA tokens. We won’t cover that in this guide).

Buy the Gala Games crypto on a centralized cryptocurrency exchange

The easiest and quickest way to buy GALA is through a centralized cryptocurrency exchange. You can check the largest GALA markets on price aggregator sites like CoinMarketCap or Coin Gecko—just check the “markets” tab. These exchanges are known as centralized exchanges, or CEXes, because they are run by companies. They contrast with decentralized crypto exchanges, like Uniswap, which are automated and run entirely on code.

Centralized crypto exchanges come with various fee structures, kickbacks, and incentives, and each exchange will list GALA for different pairings. Note that some exchanges, including those that provide the largest markets for Gala, have limited their services to Canadians following crackdowns from securities regulators. In addition, Wealthsimple Crypto doesn’t support crypto withdrawals for GALA, as of April 2022.

When buying GALA from a centralized crypto exchange, you have two options. The first is to buy it through a brokerage service and the second is to buy it on the “pro” version of the site, through a matching engine. Brokerage services tend to be more expensive but are very easy to familiarize yourself with—you pay for the convenience. Matching engines, which fulfill bids and asks from buyers and sellers on crypto exchanges, charge far lower fees.

To trade on a centralized crypto exchange, the first thing you need to do is create an account. This requires you to hand over some sort of identifying information, like a driver’s license or a passport, and perhaps a selfie. Once your account has been verified, you’re ready to trade. To buy from an exchange’s brokerage service, you need to deposit some money onto the exchange or hook up your debit card—it depends on the exchange you’re using.

The exact method to buy through a brokerage service depends on the crypto exchange you’re using, but most of the sites look the same. You’re looking for the “Buy/Sell” button, often located on the top-right-hand side of the page, above the GALA price chart. Click buy, and then enter how much you’d like to buy. You can buy the GALA cryptocurrency directly for CAD, sell it for cash or convert it to another cryptocurrency.

Buying GALA directly with CAD is usually far more expensive than interacting with an exchange’s order book. If you spend $10 to buy GALA using CAD through an exchange’s brokerage, several of those dollars could be eaten up by exchange and payment processing fees. The GALA coin price quoted by a brokerage could be slightly higher than the market price to account for the cut the brokerage will take from the purchase. By comparison, an exchange’s matching engine might charge you just 0.1%, or about 10 cents.

To take advantage of lower fees, you need to head to the “pro” version of an exchange. These can be a little tricky to find, and not all brokerages offer an exchange service. Look for the “pro” or “advanced” or “trading” site. There, an exchange’s order book details all outstanding orders, and an order form lets you submit your own order to buy and sell crypto.

Under “Select market,” type in GALA. If you don’t have any of the relevant currencies in your account’s wallet, you’ll have to buy or deposit them. Let’s assume that you want to buy GALA with Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, that you have previously bought with CAD elsewhere. Assuming that you want to buy GALA with BTC, you may first have to sell your BTC for USD, EUR or USDT, and then buy GALA with one of those cryptocurrencies. It might seem cumbersome, but these trades are a lot cheaper.

Buying GALA on a decentralized exchange

If you want to buy GALA on a decentralized exchange (also known as a DEX), you again have two options. GALA is native to the Ethereum blockchain but also supports a BEP-20 standard, meaning that it is also compatible with the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchain.

The most popular decentralized exchange on Ethereum is called Uniswap; on Binance Smart Chain, the equivalent exchange is PancakeSwap. The way to use these exchanges is near identical—indeed, PancakeSwap is a fork of Uniswap.

To use them, you have to first create a Web3 wallet. A popular option, which supports both Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, is MetaMask. This will require you to remember a private key and a seed phrase—the equivalent of a password to your crypto wallet. Never share these codes with anyone. These wallets live in your browser as an extension, or on your phone as an app.

Once you’ve created your wallet, you need to fill it with the cryptocurrency you plan to buy GALA with—DEXes do not support fiat currencies, like the US or Canadian dollar—plus some of the Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain native currency to pay for the transaction fee. That’s ETH for Ethereum and BNB for Binance Smart Chain. Note that BSC transactions are far cheaper than Ethereum transactions, as of this writing. But if you buy the BSC version of GALA, you’ll have to convert it to the ERC-20 version of GALA if you want to use it within Ethereum’s decentralized finance protocols, and vice versa.

After funding your wallet with the appropriate funds, head to either PancakeSwap or Uniswap and hit “connect wallet.” Confirm this within your MetaMask wallet, then head to “swap,” and select the tokens you’d like to convert. On Uniswap, it’s GALA, and on PancakeSwap it’s called pTokens GALA—this is a variant of GALA built on the p.Network that is pegged to the value of the ERC-20 version of GALA. You can convert your BEP-20 GALA to an ERC-20 GALA on the pToken decentralized application.

Unlike CEXes, most DEXes are structured as automated market makers, meaning that when you sell ETH for GALA, you’re adding, say, ETH to a huge pool of ETH devoted to an ETH/GALA pairing, and draining that pool of GALA. Once you’ve confirmed your transaction, the GALA is yours!

Frequently Asked Questions

Gala is the native cryptocurrency of Gala Games, a gaming platform created by one of the co-founders of Zynga. The platform is championing a new genre of video game called “play-to-earn,” which rewards you with cryptocurrencies for playing the game. These cryptocurrencies can be sold for cash. Gala’s token, GALA, is the backbone of this economy; although individual games within the Gala Games ecosystem have their own cryptocurrencies, GALA is the universal currency.

We can’t instruct you on the GALA coin’s potential or provide you with any GALA price predictions or projections. However, we can tell you that the success of Gala’s economy is likely to be somewhat dependent on the success of the games within the economy. If nobody plays the games, gamers will have little demand for the GALA token.

Of course, this is a cryptocurrency, so it’s difficult to tell how much of an impact the Gala Games economy will have on the token’s price. Many people think that all cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value and are entirely propped up by speculators.

We can, however, instruct you to exercise caution and to never invest more than you stand to lose. As they say in crypto, DYOR (do your own research), by checking the latest GALA coin news and reading reputable GALA crypto reviews and analysis.

You can buy GALA on a decentralized or centralized exchange. To buy it on a decentralized exchange, like Uniswap, connect a Web3 wallet (MetaMask is a popular choice) and buy it for another cryptocurrency. To buy it on a centralized exchange, you’ll have to sign up for an account and buy it for either cash or crypto. Stick to prominent crypto exchanges if possible, and move your crypto to your own non-custodial wallet as soon as is reasonable, in case the exchange should become insolvent.

Last Updated May 9, 2022

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