Friend.tech clone Stars Arena drives surge of activity on Avalanche

Decentralized social media (DeSo) application Stars Arena has caused a major uptick in activity on Avalanche’s C-Chain network.

As network activity increased, so did the price of the network’s native AVAX (AVAX) token, which has gained more than 8% in the last 24 hours.

Launched in late September, the Friend.tech-inspired Stars Arena has seen the total number of daily transactions on the Avalanche C-Chain — the blockchain component specifically designed for running smart contracts on Avalanche — grow by more than 186% over the past two days.

The Stars Arena application has grown rapidly as well, with more than 10,000 unique active wallets on the platform. Over the course of the past two days, the platform has witnessed more than $3.26 million in total trading volume and a little over 462,000 transactions, according to data from DappRadar.

Meanwhile, data from DefiLlama shows that the platform has exceeded $1 million in total value locked (TVL). This, however, still pales in comparison to Friend.tech, which commands some $44.27 million in TVL.

Like Friend.tech, Star Arena lets users link their X (Twitter) accounts to the platform. Users then use the AVAX token to purchase “tickets” of other users, with a small cut of fees being paid to the platform itself and the users when tickets are bought and sold.

While purchasing a user’s ticket provides users with access to a private chat, unlike Friend.tech, Stars Arena features a public feed, so users can follow others without needing to front up large sums of money.

Related: Decentralized social networks have a retention problem, say execs

Pseudonymous X user Wale.swoosh described Stars Arena as “superior to Friend.tech in a lot of ways,” with its public feed feature allowing users to be more social than they would on the Base-based DeSo app.

I’ve capitulated in creating a Stars Arena account after seeing it all over my timeline.

Won’t shill my own ref link, but a few thoughts:

Stars Arena is superior to Friendtech in a lot of ways and solves one of the main problems I had with FT.

There is a public feed, so people… pic.twitter.com/S9KzPp3hqC

— wale.swoosh (@waleswoosh) October 4, 2023

Still, Wale.swoosh and a number of other users across X noted that the application was still quite buggy, with chats being “very laggy,” and drew attention to the lack of information on the team behind the application.

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, outpacing the next-closest app, PostTech, by more than $283 million.

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