In a twist within the Stars Arena price mechanism, a flaw emerged, allowing hackers to abscond with approximately $2,000. Nonetheless, the vulnerability has since been diligently patched.
The visionary minds steering the newly introduced protocol, Stars Arena, inspired by Friend.tech, faced what they branded as a “coordinated FUD” onslaught. This came on the heels of them successfully remedying an exploit that had enabled malefactors to seize $2,000 from the decentralized social media platform rooted in Avalanche.
Taking to X (Twitter) on October 5, the Stars Arena official account announced the successful resolution of the exploit, emphasizing, “Let there be no misunderstanding; we are engaged in a battle.”
A pseudonymous X user by the handle “0xlilitch” took a swipe at Stars Arena, chastising its “inexperienced developers” for overlooking a vulnerability tied to the platform’s price function. This loophole had empowered the attackers to exchange nonexistent user “tickets” for Avalanche AVAX tokens, effectively for free.
Curiously, the attack vector ultimately proved to be financially unviable for the would-be exploiters. The exploitation itself triggered a substantial surge in gas fees on the Avalanche network, rendering the extraction of gains from the hack far more costly than initially anticipated.
Consequently, it appears that the attackers ended up expending more on gas fees than they were able to accrue through the exploit.
Emin Gün Sirer, the CEO of Ava Labs, brought attention to this fact in an X post, revealing that, on average, the hackers spent $0.25 for every $0.04 they managed to gain through the exploit.
Despite the somewhat lackluster success of the exploit, members of the crypto community wasted no time in launching their criticisms at the Stars Arena team. The pseudonymous founder and developer of Delegate, known as “Foobar,” led the charge, asserting that the platform had mishandled its Friend.tech fork and bluntly advising Stars Arena to “terminate your account and product, this is a clown show.”
Stars Arena represents the latest addition to the ever-expanding roster of social finance platforms, joining the likes of Alpha on the Bitcoin network, Friendzy on Solana, and PostTech on Arbitrum.
Yet, in this thriving landscape of DeSo apps, Friend.tech continues to reign supreme as the market leader, boasting a monthly trading volume exceeding $293 million and outpacing its nearest competitor, PostTech, by a staggering $283 million.
