No.253
GUNZ GUN
the armory chain that forges loot into NFTs you actually own
🎭 a cyberpunk gunsmith built by a game studio, with a sci-fi film director sketching its world
💬 “Hand me your scuffed rifle skin and I'll stamp it with a serial number nobody can fake. It's yours now, sell it, rent it, keep it. The match keeps running while I work.”
- Who: a gaming Layer 1 blockchain from AAA studio Gunzilla Games, makers of the shooter Off The Grid.
- Why: so in-game items become NFTs you truly own and can trade or rent, without the game grinding to a halt.
- How: it runs as an Avalanche subnet, so it's fast and the gas is tiny.
- Token: GUN, capped at 10 billion, with game revenue funding buybacks so the supply trends down, not up.
📖 The Story
2020. Gunzilla Games opens its doors in Frankfurt, an independent AAA studio set up by Vlad Korolev and Alexander Zoll, with extra teams in Los Angeles and Kyiv. The pitch was a big, serious shooter, not a crypto project.
2021. Neill Blomkamp, the director of the film District 9, joins as Chief Visionary Officer to shape the world of the studio's flagship game, Off The Grid. The look of the thing was always going to feel cinematic and grim-future.
The problem they kept hitting. In most games, the rare skin or weapon you grind for never really belongs to you, it lives on the company's servers and vanishes the day they pull the plug. Gunzilla wanted players to own their loot for real. The catch: bolting a blockchain onto a fast shooter usually makes everything slow and expensive, which ruins the fun.
So they built their own chain to fit the game, instead of forcing the game onto someone else's chain. March 31, 2025. The GUNZ mainnet and the GUN token go live, and GUN is listed on Binance through its Launchpool. What began as one studio's loot problem is now a Layer 1 anyone can build games on.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
GUNZ is its own Avalanche subnet, a custom chain that borrows Avalanche's fast agreement method instead of the slow mining Bitcoin uses. Because it's purpose-built for games, it can handle a lot of activity at once and the gas fees stay tiny, which matters when thousands of players are trading gear mid-match. The interesting twist: special NFT validator nodes, up to about 10,000 of them, are the ones that mint in-game items as NFTs and earn a cut of fees and resale commissions.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Rare real-world backing for a game coin: an actual AAA studio, a shipped shooter in Off The Grid, and a recognizable film director shaping the world
- The chain is tuned for games, so speed and gas don't fall apart when a match gets busy
- The GUN supply is fixed at 10 billion, and game revenue funds buybacks with burns, so it's designed to tighten over time (rather than minting new coins forever the way some tokens do)
- Its value leans heavily on one studio and one game. If Off The Grid loses players, the whole economy feels it
- GUN is young, it only launched in 2025, so the price can swing hard and there's little long history to judge it by
- The promised buyback-and-burn depends on the game actually earning money, which is a bet, not a guarantee
- Plenty of past game tokens have faded, so "players own their loot" still has to prove it holds players over the long run
🧬 Evolution lineage
GUNZ is not a fork of another coin. It's its own Layer 1, built as a subnet inside the Avalanche ecosystem, so think of it as a sibling to other Avalanche chains rather than a child of one coin.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is GUNZ?
- GUNZ is a gaming-focused Layer 1 blockchain built by AAA studio Gunzilla Games. It runs as an Avalanche subnet, and its GUN token is the currency for an economy where in-game items become NFTs that players actually own, trade, and rent.
- Who made GUNZ?
- Gunzilla Games, an independent AAA studio founded in 2020 by Vlad Korolev and Alexander Zoll, based in Frankfurt with offices in Los Angeles and Kyiv. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp joined in 2021 as Chief Visionary Officer.
- Is the GUN supply capped?
- Yes. The maximum supply is fixed at 10 billion GUN. Gunzilla also committed to spend about 30% of game revenue buying GUN back, with some of it burned, so over time it is designed to shrink rather than inflate.
- When did GUN launch?
- The GUNZ mainnet and the GUN token launched on March 31, 2025, and GUN was listed on Binance through Binance Launchpool. It moves a lot, so only ever try a small amount. (Information only, not an exchange or investment recommendation.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.