The Arena hands its V2 staking program to Moats

In Brief:

• The Arena said it will partner with Moats to roll out its V2 staking program for $ARENA.
• Holders will be able to stake, lock or burn $ARENA, with each option paying different points and rewards.
• Staking pays the most Moats points, which feed a Fort Score that Moats has tied to a planned airdrop.

The Arena is running its V2 staking program on Moats, the Avalanche SocialFi app said in a post on X.

Holders get three doors instead of one. They can stake $ARENA and withdraw at will, lock it for a fixed term, or burn it outright. Each pays a different mix of points and rewards.

“Gladiators will earn the most possible Moats points for staking $ARENA,” The Arena said. “You will have the choice to stake, lock, or burn $ARENA for different points and rewards.”

How the three options price against each other hasn’t been published, and no start date has been given.

What Moats does

Moats is staking and rewards infrastructure built by FortiFi. It lets a token project configure a staking and reward distribution system without writing contracts, and it ships with Snapshot integration so staking and governance run off the same deposits. The contracts have been audited.

Lock terms run from one day to two years, with longer commitments earning higher rewards. Burners permanently remove supply and still receive rewards or special access. Projects can change reward rates and lock periods later rather than being fixed to whatever they picked at launch.

Points work on two levels. Every Moat issues its own Moat Points, tracked separately from the rest. A user’s Fort Score is a weighted aggregate of those points across every Moat they touch, and Moats has said the Fort Score correlates directly to an upcoming airdrop for early participants. A $MOATS governance token is planned, with the community directing platform development and emissions.

What it changes for ARENA holders

Staking $ARENA already does work on The Arena. Tokens staked through the Token Portal carry governance weight at one vote per token against a total supply of 10 billion, and they confer Arena Champion status. Champions receive an airdrop of 2.5% of the supply of every token that graduates off the platform’s launchpad.

The V2 program layers a second points economy on top of that, one The Arena doesn’t control. Neither side has said whether Champion tiers will count locked or burned tokens the same way they count staked ones.

$ARENA launched on the Avalanche C-Chain and debuted exclusively on Trader Joe.

Background

The Arena started life as Stars Arena in late 2023, porting the buy-a-creator’s-ticket mechanic to Avalanche. A contract exploit gutted it. A new team acquired the project in November 2023 and rebuilt it under CEO Jason Desimone and COO Phillip Liu Jr., raising $2 million in pre-seed funding.

V2 arrived in May 2025 and folded a bonding-curve launchpad and a native DEX into the social feed. Creators have taken more than $5 million in tips through live streaming and Stages, the platform’s social audio product, and the launchpad has done more than $500 million in volume.

Points on The Arena are distributed every Monday at 14:00 EST. Airdrop recipients got 15% of their allocation at launch with the remaining 85% released monthly over a year, and anything unclaimed inside the 12-month window rolls into a Future Incentives and Growth pool.

Moats has run this playbook before. Its $FREAK Moat, built with the Avalanche NFT project Lucid Red, pays participants in USDC and offers the same stake, lock and burn structure. As of May 8, 2025, that Moat held 25.85 million $FREAK staked and 96.06 million locked. Another 74.40 million had been burned, roughly 19.36% of total supply.