According to Cointelegraph, the team behind the Friend.tech-inspired protocol Stars Arena has addressed and dismissed what they called "coordinated FUD" after patching an exploit that allowed attackers to steal $2,000 from the Avalanche-based decentralized social media platform. In an Oct. 5 post on Twitter, the Stars Arena account announced that the exploit had been fixed and warned that they were being targeted by malicious actors.
A pseudonymous Twitter user, "0xlilitch", criticized Stars Arena, claiming that its developers missed patching a vulnerability in the platform's price function. This allowed the attackers to sell zero user "tickets" in exchange for technically free Avalanche AVAX (AVAX) tokens. However, the attack turned out to be economically unfeasible for the attackers, as the exploit caused a significant surge in gas fees on Avalanche, making extracting the earnings from the hack far more expensive than anticipated. As a result, the attackers reportedly spent more on gas fees than they gained from the exploit.
Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer highlighted in a Twitter post that for every $0.04 earned from the exploit, the hackers spent an average of $0.25. Despite the relatively unsuccessful exploit, crypto community members were quick to criticize the Stars Arena team. The pseudonymous founder and developer of Delegate, known as "Foobar," slammed the platform, claiming it botched its Friend.tech fork, and told Stars Arena to "delete your account and product, clownshow."
Stars Arena is the latest app to join a growing roster of social finance platforms, such as Alpha on the Bitcoin network, Friendzy on Solana, and PostTech on Arbitrum. Despite the surge in similar DeSo apps, Friend.tech remains the market leader with more than $293 million in monthly trading volume and outpaces the next-closest app, PostTech, by more than $283 million.
