Stars Arena Faces Exploit on Avalanche-Based Platform

The team behind the new Friend.tech-inspired protocol Stars Arena has dismissed what it termed “coordinated FUD” after patching an exploit that saw attackers escape with $2,000 from the Avalanche-based decentralized social media platform.

In a tweet dated October 5, the Stars Arena account stated that the exploit had been patched and added, “Don’t get this wrong, we are at war.”

X user “0xlilitch” criticized Stars Arena, claiming that its “noob devs” failed to patch a vulnerability in the platform’s price function that allowed attackers to sell “tickets” to zero users in exchange for essentially free Avalanche AVAX tokens.

However, the attackers reportedly found the assault vector to be economically unfeasible. The exploit itself caused a significant increase in Avalanche’s gas prices, which made extracting the earnings from the breach considerably more costly than anticipated.

Consequently, the assailants allegedly spent more on gas fees than they made from the exploit. In an X post, the CEO of Ava Labs, Emin Gün Sirer, noted that for every $0.04 earned from the exploit, the hackers spent an average of $0.25.

Crypto community members were eager to retaliate against the Stars Arena team, despite the relatively unsuccessful exploit.

“Foobar,” the pseudonymous founder and developer of Delegate, criticized the platform, alleging that it botched its Friend.tech fork, and instructed Stars Arena to “delete your account and product, clownshow.”

Stars Arena is the most recent addition to a roster of social finance platforms that includes Alpha on the Bitcoin network, Friendzy on Solana, and PostTech on Arbitrum.

Despite the proliferation of similar DeSo apps, Friend.tech continues to dominate the market with more than $293 million in monthly trading volume, surpassing PostTech by more than $283 million.