Social Protocol Stars Arena Takes on Friend.Tech While Boosting AVAX

Since its launch in late September, Stars Arena—once known as Starshares—has drawn a significant increase in transactions on the Avalanche network. According to DappRadar, the Stars Arena platform recorded over 215,000 transactions on Monday, a sharp rise from the 16,000 daily transactions seen in late September.

The transaction volume on the Stars Arena platform has also skyrocketed, exceeding $1.7 million on Monday.

Stars Arena is a social platform built on Avalanche's Contract Chain (C-Chain), designed for smart contracts and compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM). Stars Arena currently has over 14,000 active wallets attached to the platform.

Like Friend.Tech, users on Stars Arena link their Twitter accounts to the platform. Once connected, users can trade profile tokens of other members. Users must link an AVAX address to their profiles to transfer funds from the platform.

Active Stars Arena and Twitter user @waleswoosh said they were pleased with the Stars Arena platform but that more could be done to improve it.

“Stars Arena is superior to Friendtech in a lot of ways and solves one of the main problems I had with FT,” they tweeted. “There is a public feed, so people don't have to pay to see your posts. That was the main problem with FT—it was not accessible to large parts of my audience."

Waleswoosh also highlighted areas needing improvement, pointing out the platform's lack of a stable chat function and clarity regarding its management team.

While Stars Arena has seen a wave of new interest since its launch, according to a Dune report, Friend.Tech continues to have a substantial lead in the social platform space, with 7.25 million monthly transactions and $33.4 million in weekly volume. By comparison, Stars Arena—still listed as Starshares—shows 691.8 thousand monthly transactions and $6.4 million in weekly volume.

Interest in Stars Arena has also positively affected the AVAX token, boosting its value from $9.21 on Tuesday to currently trade at $10.08, according to CoinMarketCap.

Blockchain analysts took notice of the sharp rise in the value of the AVAX token and the likely reason for it.

“Avalanche network transactions up nearly 50% on the back of Stars Arena surging in popularity,” blockchain analysis Patrick Scott said. “Good reminder that this industry is still early, and a single killer app can have a meaningful impact on usage statistics.”

However, amidst the buzz around Stars Arena, not everyone appeared impressed and ready to drop everything to jump on the latest crypto bandwagon.

“Am I the only person that does not care about Friend.Tech or Stars Arena?” Twitter user Kodama wrote, voicing their indifference. “[I] can't be bothered to use more apps, [I have] too much screentime already, [I value] time > money.”

Yet, Kodama also acknowledged connecting their account to Stars Arena after a while.

“I am really a hypocrite,” Kodama wrote with a cry-laughing emoji, adding that the onboarding process was fast and easy compared to that of Friend.Tech.