On October 6, 2023, someone persuaded a domain registrar that they were an authorized member of Galxe. They supplied false documents. The registrar let them in. Visitors to a platform built around credentials and trust were then sent to a counterfeit website, where signing a transaction could empty a wallet. The blockchain contracts, Galxe later said, remained safe. The address bar was where things went wrong.
It is an unusually revealing introduction to Bullet Labs, the venture studio behind Galxe, Gravity and Alva. Its products inhabit a world where proving what someone has done is valuable, proving who they are is difficult, and an ordinary administrative mistake can undo some very sophisticated engineering.
- Bullet Labs builds and backs companies; Galxe is its community growth platform.
- Quests attract participants. Identity checks and analytics help teams understand them.
- The useful lesson: choose the behavior you value before paying people to perform it.
A crowd is easy. A community is harder.
Consider a familiar marketing problem. A project offers rewards for joining its community. People arrive. The dashboard looks terrific. But how many visitors want the product, how many want the prize, and how many apparent visitors are controlled by the same person? In crypto, a wallet is an account, not a census entry.
Bullet Labs works on several sides of that problem. Galxe Quest lets teams organize campaigns around verifiable activities, connecting social participation with blockchain actions. Passport adds identity verification. Starboard measures contributions across social and onchain activity. The likely buyers are community managers, ecosystem teams and marketers trying to turn participation into something a business can use.
Galxe named Coinbase, Polygon and Optimism among users of its platform in its Passport V3 announcement. Its May 2025 Starboard launch reported more than 34 million users and 7,000 brands. Those are platform-reported totals. Reading a user count as a count of distinct human beings would skip the very problem these products address.
May 2025. A platform total, not an independently verified human headcount.
The NFT that became a record
In a 2025 interview, Galxe co-founder Charles Wayn traced the original idea to experiments he and Harry Zhang were conducting with DeFi. Their starting point was NFT-as-a-service: make it easy for businesses to issue tokens recognizing membership, achievement or status. The interesting discovery was that a token could connect recognition to something a user had actually done.
That moved the emphasis toward credentials: reusable evidence of behavior. By January 2022, Project Galaxy, Galxe’s earlier name, had announced a $10 million financing round led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital. The stated uses included expanding data sources and building applications around credential records.
The distinction matters. Bullet Labs is the studio. Galxe is a product business it formed. A financing announcement for Project Galaxy tells us what capital reached that project; it does not establish the studio’s own funding or valuation.
“Web3 teams could attract users, but they couldn’t always identify who truly mattered.”Charles Wayn, on the thinking behind Starboard, 2025
The price of showing up
The commercial machinery is easier to understand than the vocabulary. Galxe sells subscriptions to businesses and memberships to individuals, alongside paid verification. Its published Business+ table lists Essentials at $999 a month when billed annually, a commitment of $11,988. Growth costs more, and Enterprise pricing is custom.
For an individual, Passport’s documented ID verification fee is $5, with a one-time waiver for eligible Premium and Unlimited members. Facial re-verification costs $1. These are software and verification charges; a team still needs to think about its incentive budget and any applicable network costs.
Passport V3, introduced with Sumsub in May 2025, aims to make a verified identity reusable across applications. Transak and Banxa were named as early integration partners. It combines document checking with privacy mechanisms, including zero-knowledge proofs for selected attributes. Participation still has conditions: the help documentation excludes certain regions and rejects applicants under 18.
- 01QuestSet tasks.
Attract participants. - 02PassportCheck identity.
Limit duplicates. - 03StarboardTrack contributions.
Allocate rewards.
A product map, not a mandatory sequence.
The ordinary door into a blockchain business
The 2023 attack exposes the limit of discussing trust solely as cryptography. Galxe’s account says an impersonator bypassed its registrar’s security process using falsified documents. Nameserver changes redirected visitors to a phishing site. Users who approved malicious transactions lost funds.
The team restored the domain, communicated through community channels and worked with wallet partners to flag the danger. Its recovery plan promised affected users the value of their losses plus an additional 10% from the company treasury. The practical lesson reaches beyond crypto: a trusted application depends on the support processes of the companies around it.
Build the road after the traffic
The other product names widen the studio’s ambitions. Gravity supplies blockchain infrastructure. Alva addresses the research workload, gathering material from project documents, news, social discussion and blockchain data into an AI-assisted interface. The common thread is reducing the number of disconnected steps required to participate.
Gravity also provides a concrete recent development. In July 2026, Galxe described Gravity L1 as fully operational and scheduled Alpha Mainnet operations to end on November 1. Its explanation was practical: two networks divided engineering resources, liquidity and tooling. Consolidation would put activity in one environment.
At the campaign layer, Zealy and Layer3 offer alternative routes into quests, rewards and onchain discovery. Bullet Labs’ distinctive proposition is the breadth of the connected products it makes: acquisition, verification, measurement, infrastructure and research. Whether that breadth helps depends on how many of those jobs a customer actually needs.
A rule worth borrowing
You can copy the operating logic without launching a token. Specify the action that matters. Verify it. Measure what happens afterward. If your reward attracts people who disappear when it stops, the campaign has purchased attendance. Bullet Labs’ more interesting wager is that better records can help a team recognize the people worth inviting back.