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

In an Oct. 5 post on X (Twitter), the Stars Arena account said the exploit was fixed, adding, “Don’t get this wrong, we are at war.”

Pseudonymous X user “0xlilitch” took a swipe at Stars Arena, saying its “noob devs” missed patching a vulnerability in the platform’s price function allowing the attackers to sell zero user “tickets” in exchange for technically free Avalanche AVAX (AVAX) tokens.

However, the attack vector reportedly turned out to be economically unfeasible for the attackers. The exploit itself caused a major surge in the gas fees on Avalanche, which made extracting the earnings from the hack far more expensive than anticipated.

As a result, the attackers supposedly ended up spending more on gas fees than they netted from the exploit.

Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer highlighted in an X 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 lash out at the Stars Arena team.

Related: Friend.tech SIM-swap scourge continues as scammer nets $385K in Ether

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.

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