The team behind Stars Arena, a decentralized social media protocol inspired by Friend.tech, has responded to what they describe as "coordinated FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) following the resolution of a vulnerability that allowed attackers to exploit the platform on Avalanche. In a tweet on October 5, the Stars Arena team announced that the bug had been fixed and emphasized their commitment to addressing such issues, stating, "Make no mistake, we are at war."
A pseudonymous user, "0xlilitch," criticized Stars Arena, suggesting that the platform's "noob devs" had missed patching a vulnerability related to the platform's price function, which allowed attackers to exploit the system by creating zero-cost user "tickets" in exchange for Avalanche's AVAX tokens. However, it was noted that this attack method might not be financially feasible for attackers due to the significant increase in Avalanche's gas fees caused by the vulnerability. As a result, the attackers may end up spending more on gas fees than they would earn from the vulnerability.
Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer pointed out that hackers earned a mere $0.04 from the vulnerability while spending an average of $0.25 on gas fees. Although the attack was relatively unsuccessful, some members of the cryptocurrency community criticized the Stars Arena team for the incident.
One anonymous founder and developer of Delegate, known as "Foobar," harshly criticized the platform, suggesting that it mishandled the Friend.tech fork and advising Stars Arena to "delete your account and products, clown show." Despite this incident, Stars Arena is one of several social finance platforms in the growing decentralized space, joining the likes of Alpha on the Bitcoin network, Friendzy on Solana, and PostTech on Arbitrum.
