About

Orca is a permissionless exchange on Solana that operates via concentrated liquidity automated market maker (CLAMM) pools. On Orca’s application, users can trade SPL tokens that have liquidity and/or provide liquidity to existing/new SPL token pairs. In contrast to a traditional automated market maker (AMM) pool where liquidity is provided across the entire price range from zero to infinity, liquidity providers (LPs) on Orca can choose a price range within which to provide liquidity or opt to provide the full range in certain pools where this feature is available.

History

Orca was co-founded by Yutaro Mori and Ori Kwan and was first introduced in February 2021 to build an exchange on Solana that “offers market rates,” limited slippage, and user experience improvements such as displaying token balances in-application.

According to a Medium post from February 2021, Orca was the third application to launch on Solana.

On Aug. 9, 2021, the project team launched ORCA via Serum, an order-book-based decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana. On Aug. 12, 2021, yield farming rewards paid in ORCA were introduced to incentivize liquidity provisioning for select liquidity pools.

In November 2021, the project team raised over $1.20 million in mint fees via Orcanauts, an NFT collection. The funds raised were subsequently donated to charity via the Orca Climate Fund, “an autonomous enterprise” that makes donations to organizations working to protect the environment.

In April 2022, the project team launched the Orca DAO, a governance mechanism for ORCA tokenholders. In the same month, the team launched Whirlpools, Orca’s concentrated liquidity pools where users can choose a price range to provide liquidity. Orca had previously only offered Aquafarms, its standard pools where users can provide a full range of liquidity.

In July 2022, the Orca DAO approved the creation of the Orca Governance Council, a seven-member body that dually governs the protocol alongside ORCA tokenholders.

In November 2023, the project team introduced the “Liquidity Terminal,” a new interface for interacting with Orca that includes candlestick charts, historical prices, liquidity depth, and token information such as price and market capitalization.