Orca abstracts the complexities that a regular user would have encountered while trading their cryptocurrency tokens. There is no need to make life harder than it already is and the Orca Team has devoted itself to refining and building a human-centered application for their users.
Apart from being a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, Orca also functions as an Automatic Market Maker (AMM) on the Solana blockchain. With the provision of an avenue for you to provide liquidity to a trading pool, you get to earn your share of the trading fees received from the users as a reward.
What is a DEX?
A Decentralized Exchange, which is also referred to as a DEX is an application built on a blockchain protocol which allows a secured peer-to-peer trading of cryptocurrencies (or financial offerings) without the need of an intermediary as in the case of traditional exchange mediums. When using a DEX, users can purchase any available cryptocurrencies on that decentralized exchange and they can also sell those cryptocurrencies. One of the core useful tools that has helped people in building decentralized applications on many blockchains is a DEX. On Decentralized Exchanges, the traditional order book in trading is replaced by the liquidity pools that have been made available on a blockchain protocol for whatever digital cryptocurrencies that are to be traded. Popular Decentralized Exchanges are Serum on Solana blockchain and Uniswap on Ethereum.
The Orca DEX was purposely built for people, and not for computer programs. But aren’t DEXes supposed to be built for people normally? Yes, they should. But Orca painstakingly ensures that their users experience smooth transaction processes while using their DEX for trading. Some of the cool features you can find on their DEX are as follows:
- Fair Price Indicators: Users of a Decentralized Exchanges are sometimes bothered about the fairness of the trade they execute. Orca provides a Fair price indicator with two main purposes: Firstly, when it’s ticked with “Green” font color, it means the rate of the token is within 1% of the current rate at CoinGecko. The second purpose of this Fair price indicator is to ensure that the Slippage that would occur in the trade will be less than or equal to 1%.
If you get a green tick on the trade then you are good to go. If not, you will get a Rate Warning or a Slippage warning.
- Speedy Swap: On Orca, the token swap transactions occur very fast, even if the token would have to be converted to other tokens before it finally gets to the choice token of the user.
- Token Balances: On some Decentralized exchanges (like some of the popular ones on Ethereum ecosystem), to know your token balance in your wallet and their worth in real-time, you would have to keep different tabs open on your device because you can’t get them on the same page where you have your wallet connected. This makes transactions on these DEXes very demanding and tiresome. We know DEXes to be stressful, but Orca has done a lot of heavy lifting by providing this need right in the page where your wallet is connected. You get to see your current asset balances and their worth. This really makes life easier on a DEX.
Swapping on Orca.so
It is easy to swap your tokens on Orca. Below is a step-by-step process in swapping two tokens on Orca.
OOGI ???????? USDC
After clicking on “Exchange”, you need to approve the transaction in your wallet.
You immediately get a “Confirming” message displayed.
Once this is shown on the page, you need to wait till the transaction is complete. (This process happens almost immediately)
Once you see the Exchange Complete, the tokens have been swapped successfully.
Orca Pools
Orca provides two categories of farm on the platform. There is the Aquafarm and the Double-Dip Pool. On Aquafarm pools, users receive $ORCA tokens and their share of the trading fees while in the Double-Dip Pool, depositors receive their proportionate share of the trading fees only, coupled with tokens received from the project in which they have deposited their liquidity.
Steps to provide and remove liquidity on the pools:
- Providing Liquidity
Step 1: Go to https://www.orca.so/pools
Step 2: Select a pair from the pool of your choice
Step 3: Click “Deposit” and add the number of tokens you want to deposit
Step 4: Approve all transactions
Removing Liquidity
Step 1: Go to https://www.orca.so/pools
Step 2: Click “Withdraw” on the Token pair you have deposited in the pool.
Step 3: Approve all transactions
Double Dip Pools
In Double-Dip Pools, depositors get an advantage of receiving additional tokens as reward for their participation in providing liquidity to their favorite pool (as long as the project is enabled for the Double-Dip category)
$ORCA Token
Orca issued a Governance token which is denoted by the same name ORCA. With the Orca Treasury that functions as a DAO, the value of ORCA token is tied to ORCA DEX itself. The gradual emission of Orca to liquidity providers through yield farming, the Orca protocol becomes decentralized gradually. ORCA currently trades at around $15.259 as at the time of writing this article. ORCA promised to release their token if ORCA proved to be creating value in the Solana blockchain space. After months of delivering according to their plan, when Orca had effected over $400M in trading activities on their protocol, they launched the token.
Tokenomics
The ORCA governance token was issued on the 9th of August, 2021. The total supply of ORCA token is 100 million. But currently, only 5.25 million of the total supply is in circulation. The total supply of 5.25 million ORCA was airdropped and given to the community who qualified because of the useful activities they have performed on the protocol and for the protocol. (All wallet addresses that were eligible were determined by their transactions before Aug 2, 2021 at 00:00 UTC).
A total of 4,000,000 ORCA was airdropped to the wallet addresses that had provided liquidity of $100 and above on the DEX. The amount of ORCA received was proportional to the amount of liquidity provided. The more liquidity provided; the more ORCA tokens received.
A total of 1,000,000 ORCA was distributed to the traders on ORCA DEX.
Among the traders who have traded between $1000 and $10,000 worth of cryptocurrencies on ORCA, a total of 500,000 ORCA was airdropped to them while traders who have traded more than $10,000 worth of cryptocurrencies on ORCA were airdropped the remaining 500,000 ORCA.
The remaining 250,000 ORCA were airdropped to advisors of Orca who had been helpful in sourcing early liquidity needed for the operations of Orca protocol.
(The SPL token address for $ORCA on solscan is in the reference section below).
Collectibles / NFTs
Orca airdropped some non-fungible tokens (with a marine-themed design obviously) to the early adopters of the Orca DEX and also to their most active users. Tokens like this are also known as Collectibles. This is a fun way for Orca to show their gratitude to their users who keep the ship rolling. The following are the Collectibles from Orca:
Between September 28th to October 12th, 2021, all holders of the Orca collectibles who staked any of their tokens were eligible to receive a fair amount of $ORCA as reward. Right now, only the Star Fish Collectibles are still being distributed, the remaining have already been distributed to the Orca community.
You might ask, is there a real purpose for this? Who knows? But what is sure is that Collectibles are Collectibles. That’s it!
Don’t worry if you have missed out on any of the previous Collectibles from Orca – just like myself, there is more to come for us in this deep waters!
Reference: