Orca (ORCA)

What Is Orca?

Orca is the most user-friendly DEX on Solana. When you exchange tokens on Orca, you’ll enjoy speedy swaps, minimal transaction fees, and handy features like our Fair Price Indicator, which makes it easy to know whether you’re getting market rate on your trade.

Plus, users love our cute Collectibles, which are special tokens you can earn by participating in the Orca ecosystem.

Orca Unique Features

Orca consists of a lean team of two: A software engineer with deep experience in blockchain protocols, and a software engineer/interaction designer who specializes in creating human-centered digital experiences.

This combination of crypto expertise and a fresh pair of eyes gives us a unique perspective on the space. Long-term, our mission is to build blockchain apps that solve real problems for everyday people. But we’re also clear-eyed about the fact that the technology has a long way to go before widespread adoption is feasible. Transactions that cost $20 and take several minutes to confirm are simply not performant enough to compete with traditional financial solutions.

For crypto to become relevant to a wider audience, it must scale massively while remaining credibly neutral — in other words, obviously and provably non-discriminatory. Solana has laid the foundations to enable that change. The networking stack and virtual machine have seen slow progress in recent years, especially relative to other domains like advanced cryptography. In successfully implementing Proof of History and parallel transaction processing, among other innovations, Solana has proven that these areas are ripe for optimization.

The results speak for themselves. The Solana network boasts 400ms block times, 50,000 TPS, and $0.001 average transaction fees, all without the complexity of side chains or sharding. This may sound too good to be true, but having built an application from the ground up, we can vouch that Solana’s performance does not detract from the other essential properties of a blockchain (censorship resistance and security). What’s more, the Solana engineering team is actively publishing open-source building blocks for app development. By using their token-swap program as a base for our smart contract, we were able to design, develop, and launch Orca in just four months, all with our lean team of two.

That said, when it comes to an ecosystem’s success, technology alone is not sufficient. When we reached out to the Solana Foundation, we were equally impressed by the intelligence, strong values, and down-to-earth nature of their team. As such, we’re confident that Solana has all the ingredients to become a vibrant, scalable ecosystem. We’re pitching in by building a core piece of essential infrastructure: an easy-to-use, human-centered AMM.

However, the journey has just begun. Here are some of the features on the way:

• Integration of Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge between Ethereum ↔ Solana
• Collectible, valueless tokens for early adopters
• Additional trading pairs
• Analytics for price, liquidity, volume, fees, and more
• Language options in the Orca UI

Roadmap

Where we’ve been…

Orca is the AMM you love to use. As one of the first apps in the Solana ecosystem, we strive to show how crypto UX can be truly delightful. From lightning-fast swaps and minimal fees to UX innovations like our Fair Price Indicator and Magic Bar, we’ve already made major strides toward that goal.

We’re also proud to be one of the first protocols on Solana to conduct a fair launch of our governance token, which gave our community the earliest access to the ORCA token. Since then, we’ve reached $735 million in lifetime trade volume, $250 million in total value locked, and over 18,000 monthly unique wallets.

“Orca’s AMM is a critical addition to the Solana ecosystem. We are excited by the strength of the team, performance, and their community focused mission,” says Kyle Davies, Co-founder of Three Arrows.

On the community front, we’ve donated $120,000 to climate change through our Impact Fund, produced a podcast, OrcaPod, and distributed 14,000 Collectibles, making us one of the earliest projects to explore the intersection of NFTs and DeFi. In the near future, Orca Collectible holders will have access to exclusive perks, including special access to upcoming NFT projects and the opportunity to stake their Collectibles to earn ORCA!

…and where we’re going

The earliest AMMs on Ethereum shook the financial world by making it incredibly simple for anyone to swap tokens and provide liquidity. The flipside of that elegance, however, is lower capital efficiency relative to the orderbook model.

Our mission is to create a next-generation AMM that pairs greater capital efficiency with the simple, human-centered UX you’ve come to expect from Orca.

Along the way, we’ll enable Community Pools, which will enable support for the long-tail of tokens. In addition, we’ll continue improving our SDK, making it easy for any project to build on top of our smart contracts. The path there involves three major initiatives:

Feature development on the smart contract and UI layers

Awareness through global expansion, social media campaigns, and NFT art projects

Partnerships with lending platforms, dashboards, aggregators, NFT projects, and more

This fundraise gives us the resources to invest heavily in these three areas, ensuring everyone in DeFi has the chance to fall in love with our modern AMM. After that, we’ll turn our attention to building a robust governance system, with the long-term goal of full decentralization.

Orca Token Economy

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Detailed Token Metrics

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Token Distribution

Initial Circulating Supply

The ORCA governance token has an initial circulating supply of 5.25 million.

The initial supply is composed entirely of airdrops to existing liquidity providers and traders.

4,000,000 ORCA to Liquidity Providers: Distributed retroactively to existing liquidity providers, weighted by total USD value of liquidity provided since launch by Aug 2, 00:00 UTC (a leaderboard is visible at orca.so/stats)

500,000 ORCA to average traders: Distributed evenly to addresses with a total USD trade value between $1,000 and $10,000 by Aug 2, 00:00 UTC

500,000 ORCA to heavy traders: Distributed evenly to addresses with a total USD trade value ≥ $10,000 by Aug 2, 00:00 UTC

250,000 ORCA to advisors: These tokens were allocated to our advisors, e^{i} ventures, in exchange for sourcing early liquidity for the Orca protocol.

Team and Advisors

20% to team

0.9% to advisors

All team members, advisors, and future investors will receive ORCA with a 3-year vesting schedule and 1-year cliff or lockup.

Token Release Schedule

Launch Schedule

Aug 9: Retroactive airdrop

Aug 9-10: Market-making on Serum to determine the initial price of ORCA in Orca’s pools

Aug 11: Aquafarm pools deployed (existing LPs may migrate liquidity and new deposits may be made. Emissions not yet live)

Aug 12: ORCA token emissions from Aquafarms begin

Partners & Advisors

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Team Members

Orca is the brainchild of cofounders Yutaro Mori and Grace “Ori” Kwan. Yutaro’s expertise in crypto stems from several years spent building Ethereum 2.0 and implementing smart contracts at UMA. Meanwhile, Ori combines her experiences as a designer and engineer at IDEO, Coursera, and Stanford to bring a human touch to DeFi.

When we launched in February 2021, we were a lean team of 2 with no outside funding. Since then, we’ve expanded the core team to 8, spanning three continents, broad professional experience (Google, Amazon, McKinsey, and many startups), and many hobbies (acro-yoga, music production, and swing dancing come to mind). We’re proud to be building not only modern financial infrastructure, but a thriving remote culture built on trust and transparency.

Investors

Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, Placeholder, DeFiance Capital, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Sino Global Capital, Zee Prime Capital, Solana Ventures, Collab Currency.