Orca Tokenholders Vote on Cutting xORCA Rewards to 10%, Moving 14.2M ORCA to the Team and Dissolving the Council

Orca ORCA$2.81+4.9% tokenholders are voting on a governance proposal that would cut the share of protocol fees paid to stakers from 40% to 10%, move the community's treasuries to the project's development team and dissolve the Governance Council that put the proposal forward. The vote opened on October 5, 2026 on Realms, the on-chain governance platform Orca uses, and closes on October 10 at 19:42 UTC, according to the proposal's Realms page and the Council's forum notice.

The proposal, "Resourcing Orca for Its Next Phase", was posted to Orca's governance forum on September 29 by forum user Cortina, who writes as a member of the Council. It passes if it collects 3,000,000 Yes votes from holders of the ORCA token. A snapshot of the Realms page taken at about 08:30 UTC on October 7 showed roughly 1.12 million Yes votes and a count of 1 beside the No option, which puts the Yes total at a little over a third of the threshold with about three and a half days of voting left.

What the Orca governance proposal changes: a 10/10/80 protocol fee split

Orca is a decentralized exchange on Solana, and its protocol fees are the revenue its smart contracts collect from trading. Under the current arrangement, as the proposal describes it, 40% of those fees buy ORCA that is paid as rewards to holders of xORCA, the staked form of the token. Another 10% goes to a community Fee Treasury and 50% goes to what the proposal calls "the initial development team".

The proposal replaces that with a 10/10/80 split. Staker rewards fall to 10% of protocol fees. A further 10% goes to a new Buyback Account managed by the team, which would buy ORCA on the open market "at its discretion" and then burn it, add it to staker rewards or use it for contributor grants. The remaining 80% funds the team's operations. The Fee Treasury's share is removed.

Two treasury transfers sit alongside the fee change. All ORCA in the community treasury wallet, which the proposal puts at "approximately 14.2M ORCA", would move to a team-controlled Strategic Account "to be deployed only toward acquisitions of teams, products, or protocols". Solana Compass holder data showed that wallet holding about 14.8 million ORCA on October 7, which is roughly 19.8% of the token's 75 million supply and makes it the largest single ORCA holder. The community Fee Treasury, which the proposal says holds about 70,000 SOL, most of it staked with Orca's own validator, would also pass to the team.

The governance changes are the last part. The Council would be dissolved, and the proposal states that afterwards "ORCA tokenholder governance would be limited to proposing and approving dilution of ORCA by minting additional tokens". In place of Council oversight, the team commits to a report every six months covering buybacks and Strategic Account spending, a written summary of each acquisition within 14 days of its close, and a voluntary registry of identified tokenholders it can contact directly.

The Council's case: a bigger operating budget and an unnamed Solana DeFi acquisition

The proposal argues that Orca cannot grow on half of its own revenue. "Orca is still a startup," it says, and "half of every dollar Orca earns leaves the operating business before the Team can leverage it". It adds that the protocol "cannot achieve its full potential on a hamstrung operating budget." The team is also the direct recipient of what the proposal moves: the 80% fee share and both treasuries.

The second argument is a deal. According to the proposal, the team "has negotiated terms to acquire a leading Solana DeFi protocol", which it says would bring new engineers, "a credit and yield product line that Orca does not have today" and "approximately 50% TVL growth", meaning growth in the value of assets deposited in the protocol. The target is not named and none of those figures can be checked independently. The proposal says the Council has "preliminarily approved" the transaction, and that all Council members voted in favor of submitting the proposal at a meeting on September 24.

The proposal's own risk section lists two items. It "moves the majority of ORCA community assets to Team control", which it says is offset by public wallets and reporting, and it "lowers near-term staking rewards".

Cortina defended the plan in a forum reply on October 3, noting that the reply reflected personal views and not necessarily those of other Council members. Any ORCA used in an acquisition "would be subject to long-term vesting schedules and/or contingent on performance milestones", Cortina wrote, and "no new ORCA is minted, and any future minting would still require a tokenholder vote." On withholding the target's name: "there are good reasons that we aren't able to provide more information about acquisitions before they're formally announced." Cortina also wrote that running a Council has a cost, because its members are compensated in ORCA.

What xORCA holders object to: governance rights, staking rewards and disclosure

Outside the Council's own accounts, every participant in the forum thread opposes the proposal or questions it. All of them post under forum usernames, and none of their holdings can be verified.

Forum user chmelevsky, replying on September 30, called the proposal "very harmful to current Orca holders" and focused on governance. It "practically eliminates Orca governance utility by dissolving the Council and limiting the set of topics on which tokenholders can vote to only dilution", chmelevsky wrote, adding that spending the treasury's ORCA on acquisitions would create sell pressure and that promised buybacks "have not really happened". Cortina's reply disputed that last point, stating that about 70% of the funds set aside for ORCA buybacks had been deployed and that roughly 3 million USDC remained.

Liege, another forum user, wrote that acquisitions and the end of the Council "might be expected", objected to the reward cut, and offered a counter-proposal: "keep the staking rewards at the 40% and the team can keep 60%", with treasury funds released only in the amount an acquisition needs "and returned if no acquisition follows."

A third account, RKingMidas, whose posts describe a long-term holder with "thousands of XORCA", asked the team to "name the acquisition target, or at least its revenue, profitability, TVL and the price", to publish an itemized budget for the 80% share, and to split the fee change, the treasury transfer and the Council's dissolution into separate votes. The budget request refers to figures the Council disclosed in January 2026 in response to an earlier tokenholder request for spending transparency: about 42 full-time staff and operating expenses of roughly $11 million a year.

The thread is small. On the morning of October 7 it held ten posts from seven accounts, and the only posts in favor came from Cortina and the Council's secretary account. The on-chain tally at the same time was almost entirely Yes. For scale, about 2,500 wallets held xORCA on October 7, according to Solana Compass data. Disputes over moving community funds to the team are also not new at Orca: an April 2025 proposal, also posted by Cortina, drew similar objections on the forum, and the current proposal says tokenholders approved it.

Open questions on the Realms vote: No votes and xORCA voting power

Two procedural questions raised on the forum had no reply from the Council or the team as of the thread's last post on October 7.

RKingMidas asked how No votes are treated: "If there are 3M Yes and 5M No, does it pass?" The Council secretary's notice says only that the proposal "passes if it reaches the tokenholder threshold of 3,000,000 'yes' votes during the 5 day voting period." The Realms page lists Yes and No as separate options and does not explain how they interact.

The same user wrote that xORCA holders cannot vote, because "only deposited ORCA counts, and unstaking takes 7 days, longer than the vote", and asked the Council to extend the vote or let xORCA count. Forum user Pixeltoy separately wrote that the voting platform "does not recognize my holdings" of xORCA. Those claims rest on the two users' accounts. Orca's governance documentation says xORCA has "boosted voting power" and does not describe an unstaking period.

What happens after the ORCA vote closes on October 10

Voting ends on October 10, 2026 at 19:42 UTC. If the proposal has reached 3,000,000 Yes votes, a two-day cool-down follows, ending on October 12 at 19:42 UTC, during which four Council votes can veto it. The proposal states that the Council endorsed it unanimously.

If the proposal passes and is not vetoed, the Orca Foundation, its board and the Council would carry it out under the Foundation's bylaws, including the amendments needed to dissolve the Council. The proposal gives no implementation date. It says the Council "intends to formally approve" the acquisition if the vote succeeds, and the acquisition target remains unnamed. The running tally is public on the Realms page until the vote closes.