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Stars Arena recovers 90% of stolen funds after offering $257K bounty

October 12, 2023 Coin Telegraph

bounty

The exploiter of the Web3 social media platform agreed to keep a 10% bounty in exchange for returning the remainder of the stolen funds.

Web3 social media platform Stars Arena says it has recovered nearly all of the crypto stolen from an Oct. 7 exploit — minus a 10% bounty to the person responsible.

In an Oct. 11 X (Twitter) post, Stars Arena said around 90% of the 266,000 Avalanche (AVAX) exploited, at the time worth around $3 million, was returned after reaching an agreement to give a 27,610 AVAX bounty worth nearly $257,000 to the exploiter.

The bounty also included compensation for 1,000 AVAX worth over $9,000 seemingly lost by the exploiter in a bridge.

UPDATE:

We have recovered approximately 90% of the lost funds.

We reached an agreement with the individual responsible for the recent security breach.

The funds have been returned in exchange for a 10% bounty fee + 1000 AVAX that was lost in a bridge.

Total funds lost:…
— Stars Arena (@starsarenacom) October 11, 2023

In a separate post, Stars Arena added it had written a new smart contract and before placing the returned funds and launching, it was finalizing an audit of the new contract.

Stars Arena first alerted its community to the exploit on Oct. 7, calling it a “major security breach” with its smart contract leading to funds being drained.

In a subsequent post, Stars Arena said it secured funding to plug the hole left by the exploit and it had contracted a development team to do a full security audit, though the team has yet to detail how the exploit took place.

Days earlier, on Oct. 5, Stars Arena was hit by a smaller exploit, though hackers only made off with around $2,000, they claimed.

The exploit was caused by Stars Arena developers missing a vulnerable price function in the platform’s smart contract. This allowed the exploiter to sell user shares for nothing and get AXAX in return, pseudonymous X user “0xlilitch” explained in a post.

Stars Area claimed to have patched the vulnerability.

Users of Stars Arena’s main competitor, Friend.tech, have also seen targeted SIM-swap attacks with Friend.tech recently adding security features to mitigate the attempts.

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Friend.tech pronounced ‘dead’ after activity and fees tank

August 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Buyers, sellers, inflows and transactions have all taken significant dives on the Friend.tech platform after its launch just over two weeks ago, prompting some critics to herald its death.

Less than three weeks after its launch, the decentralized social network Friend.tech has already been declared "dead" by critics, following a recent drop in key metrics such as activity, inflows and volume.

Friend.tech had a buzzy beta version launch on Coinbase’s layer-2 Base on Aug. 11. A week later, its fees surpassed $1 million in 24 hours on Aug. 19 outshining Uniswap and the Bitcoin network.

However, its fees have since cratered. Daily fees peaked at $1.7 million on Aug. 21, but dropped over 87% to around $215,000 on Aug. 26 according to DefiLlama.

Transactions on Friend.tech also declined over 90% from the nearly 525,000 peak on Aug. 21 with just over 51,000 transactions on Aug. 27, Dune Analytics data complied by Crypto Koryo shows, leading many on X (Twitter) post condolences for the network.

RIP Friendtech

August 2023-August 2023 pic.twitter.com/Fb0bh23Fyo
— Beanie (@beaniemaxi) August 26, 2023

Friend.tech is centered on buying and selling “keys” that enable the buyer to send private messages to the seller, with the platform reportedly taking a 5% cut.

It's attracted crypto and non-crypto influencers including UpOnly podcast host Cobie, YouTuber Faze Banks and Russian protest group Pussy Riot.

In an Aug. 27 X post, Coinbase payments risk manager Lisandro Rodriguez opined that the platform is "dead," due mainly to "greed and poor execution."

Friend tech is dead because of greed and poor execution. We can see that after the initial influencer pump volume has fallen off a cliff. Let's dig into how this failure came to be pic.twitter.com/WDQncTQJ21
— Lisandro (@TheRealLisandro) August 27, 2023

Alongside the fee decline, buyers and sellers have also tanked, with Aug. 27 seeing around 10,000 buyers and 7,800 sellers compared to the Aug. 21 peak of over 58,000 buyers and 27,000 sellers, per Dune data.

*Friend.tech buyers (green) and sellers (orange) have both steadily declined since the peak on Aug. 21. Source: Dune*

Dune shows inflows have also taken a dive from the Aug. 21 high of $16.8 million with Friend.tech seeing around $1.6 million on Aug. 27 — a nearly 90.5% decrease.

*Protocol inflows peaked on Aug. 21 but have since trended down. Source: Dune*

Before the decline over the past week, some community members had already shared their bearish predictions for the platform.

Last week, crypto commentator Yazan told Cointelegraph of factors that led him to believe Friend.tech had between six to eight weeks before it would see a decline in user key prices and activity.

Yazan said the user key price increases were unsustainable and questioned why so many would pay upwards of 1 Ether (ETH) “to be able to see a private chat.”

The platform has drawn parallels to the 2021 DeSo app BitCloud with pseudonymous Web3 marketer Legendary saying he believes Friend.tech “will collapse as BitClout did.”

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DeSo offers $1M bounty for building decentralized Reddit

July 6, 2023 Coin Telegraph

DeSo offers M bounty for building decentralized Reddit

Centralization

Developers pointed out the "monopolization of content and data" in centralized social media platforms as a need to create a decentralized alternative.

Via a July 6 announcement, decentralized social media protocol DeSo has issued a $1 million bounty for building a competitor to Reddit using its native blockchain. In supporting the decision, developers wrote:

"Reddit recently sparked controversy within its community following a decision to limit API access. This move provoked a series of 48-hour subreddit blackouts in protest. This price hike for their API has forced existing third-party developers to shut down as maintaining their applications becomes impossible."

"This controversy and others highlight the ongoing problems with centralized social media platforms," developers said, while also pointing out Elon Musk's controversial decision to impose reading limits on new and verified accounts on Twitter, citing "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." Nader Al-Naji, founder of DeSo, highlighted a shift where users embrace autonomy over social content, as with owning Bitcoin (BTC) with money:

"These protests represent a broader societal shift. They are indicative of a new paradigm in how creators and users interact with social media."

Founded in 2019, DeSo offers monetization features such as creator coins, nonfungible tokens, tokens, and tipping. The firm claims to store user identity, profiles, content, and social graph 100% on-chain, and these content cannot be banned or blocked on a protocol level. Recently, the firm released new in-app proposals such as Openfund 2.0, a decentralized exchange platform.

In September 2021, DeSo raised $200 million in funding led by a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Sequoia, Pantera Capital, and others, including, perhaps ironically, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Currently, over 150 projects are listed on the DeSo community, although their market caps are somewhat small.

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