Orca

Orca here means the Solana decentralized exchange at orca.so, not the whale or other firms with the same name. Orca is one of the oldest DEXs on Solana. Traders use it to swap tokens. Liquidity providers (LPs) put tokens into its pools to earn a share of trading fees. Its main product is Whirlpools, a pool design where each LP picks the price range their money works in. Orca launched in February 2021. In October 2026 it merged with the lending app Loopscale to form a company called Formation, and the Orca app keeps running as before. Orca now also lists tokenized stocks, regulated assets and new token launches.

How Orca Whirlpools concentrated liquidity works

Whirlpools is Orca's concentrated liquidity pool. Each LP chooses a price range, and their tokens only trade while the price stays inside it. Money placed near the current price earns more fees for each dollar. The catch is that a position stops earning once the price leaves its range.

Orca first ran a simpler pool that spread money across every possible price. It added Whirlpools in 2022. Say you add SOL and USDC in a tight band around the current price. You earn a bigger cut of each trade than you would in a full-range pool.

If SOL moves out of your band, your position ends up holding only one of the two tokens. It earns nothing until the price comes back. Tight positions also face more impermanent loss: the gap between keeping tokens in a pool and just holding them. Orca's app offers full-range positions for people who want less upkeep, and a simulator to estimate returns before you deposit.

Most trades reach Orca through aggregators such as Jupiter JUP$0.245-6.7%, which route swaps from other apps into Whirlpools. So many people use Orca's pools without ever opening its site. The Whirlpools code is open source, and developers can build on it with Orca's TypeScript and Rust SDKs or its public API.

Orca DEX fees and Adaptive Fee pools

Each Orca pool has a fee tier, and you pay it on every swap. Most of the fee goes to the pool's LPs. Orca adds no extra interface fee on standard swaps, per its FAQ. You also pay a small Solana network fee.

Adaptive Fee pools add a variable fee on top of the base tier. The extra fee rises when the price swings hard and falls back when markets calm down. The goal is to pay LPs more in the wild spells when they take the most risk. Orca's docs say this does not promise higher returns and does not remove impermanent loss.

In October 2026 Orca added two new profiles that pool creators can pick. Launch Spike is meant for new token launches. Quick Reset is for tokens that see frequent bursts of price swings. Each one changes how hard the fee rises and how fast it drops back.

Orca and Loopscale merger: what Formation changes for Orca users

On 7 October 2026 Orca and Loopscale, a Solana lending app, said they had merged into a new company called Formation. For Orca users, day-to-day use stays the same. Your positions, fees and rewards are as they were, and you don't need to withdraw, move or sign anything, Orca's Formation FAQ says.

Formation is based in New York. It joins Orca's trading pools with Loopscale's fixed-rate loans and vaults. The idea is that one asset can be listed, traded and borrowed against in one place. Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt is CEO, and Mary Gooneratne is COO. Christopher Montagano, Orca's top lawyer, now runs strategy and legal.

The Block reported that Formation plans to fund fields such as AI, robotics and defense. Its own site adds energy. The price of the deal was not made public. The FAQ says ORCA and xORCA stay the tokens of the joined group, and no new tokens will be minted. It also says Orca's programs, upgrade rights, multisig and bug bounty have not changed. Our merger report covers the deal and the vote around it.

Tokenized stocks and permissioned RWA pools on Orca

Orca is now one of Solana's main places to trade tokens that track stocks, funds or gold. You can swap many of them, or add them to a pool, at any hour of the day. Some of these assets sit in closed pools that only checked buyers can use.

In October 2026 Orca said Tesla stock tokens were live to trade and LP at any time. Backpack Securities issues them through Sunrise. In mid-October 2026, Birdeye put Orca's cumulative trading volume in tokenized assets above $1.7 billion since July 2025, a figure Orca shared.

The closed pools, which Orca calls permissioned pools, opened in May 2026, CoinDesk reported. The issuer sets who may trade, and the chain enforces the rule. You must pass a KYC check before you can buy, hold or sell the token. The first issuer was Streamex, with a gold-linked token called GLDY. See our report on the launch.

Orca also signed a deal to test a Korean won tokenized fund with Shinhan Asset Management, Etherfuse and the Solana Foundation.

Wavebreak, the Orca token launchpad

Wavebreak is Orca's launchpad for new tokens. A token first sells on a bonding curve, a set price path that climbs as people buy. When the sale ends, the token "graduates" into an Orca pool with locked liquidity.

At graduation, part of the token supply and some SOL go into a Whirlpool, SolanaFloor reports. The creator owns that liquidity, but it is locked. Wavebreak uses CAPTCHA checks and caps on each purchase to slow down bots that buy at launch. It also pays traders a daily reward based on how much they trade.

Those checks cut down on bot buying. They don't stop it fully. New launchpad tokens also carry the usual risks of young assets with thin trading.

ORCA token, xORCA staking and the October 2026 governance vote

ORCA is Orca's governance token, launched on 9 August 2021. If you stake ORCA you get xORCA. Part of Orca's protocol fees buys ORCA on the market and adds it to the staking vault, so each xORCA is worth more ORCA over time. In October 2026 holders voted on a plan to shrink that share of fees, and the result was not confirmed when we checked.

Orca's xORCA docs set out how it works. The buybacks add ORCA without minting new xORCA. To unstake, you wait seven days and hold a claim-ticket NFT, with your rate locked at the start. Votes take place on Realms.

The tokenholder proposal would make these changes:

• Cut the xORCA share of protocol fees from 40% to 10%, send 10% to a team-run buyback account and 80% to team operations.
• Move about 14.2 million ORCA and about 70,000 SOL from the treasuries to the team.
• Dissolve the governance Council, and limit future holder votes to decisions on minting new ORCA.

The Council cancelled the first vote on 8 October 2026, because xORCA holders could not unstake in time to take part. It then posted the same proposal for a second vote, which closed on 16 October.

The outcome is still unresolved on our sources as of 31 October 2026. The forum thread shows no result, and Orca has posted none on X. Orca's xORCA docs still describe the old share. Some later commentary, such as a 0xResearch podcast segment, describes the cut as done, but we could not confirm that from Orca. Check the forum before you rely on either figure. Our report on the proposal has the full terms.

Is Orca DEX safe? Audits, upgrade authority and risks

Orca has a long clean record, but its code can still change. Its website reports more than five years with zero exploits, and the Whirlpools code has six public audits. Orca's programs are upgradeable rather than fixed, so the code you use now may change later.

The audit list comes from the Whirlpools code page, and all six cover the Whirlpools program. Orca's xORCA docs call the staking contracts audited but name no auditor, so treat the table as Whirlpools-only. The Whirlpools page also supports verified builds, so anyone can check that the live program matches the public code. Coin Bureau's July 2026 review reports an Immunefi bug bounty running since May 2022, with a top payout of $500,000.

Upgrade control is the main structural risk. Orca's xORCA docs say changes to the staking contracts need three of five multisig signatures. That is safer than a single key, but those signers could still ship a change you never voted on. Orca's docs we checked don't say who holds the Whirlpools upgrade authority. The Formation FAQ only says it has not changed. We could not read it on-chain for this update, so this rests on Orca's own account.

Market risk matters as much as code risk. Tight LP positions can drift out of range and suffer impermanent loss. Anyone can create a pool, so check a token's mint address before you swap. Orca's FAQ says audits "reduce risk but do not eliminate" the risk from code, wallets, tokens, phishing and user error. The governance plan above would also hand more of the treasury and fees to the team.

Who Orca suits: traders, liquidity providers and issuers

Orca suits LPs who want to earn fees on Solana and are willing to manage a price range. If you'd rather not, a full-range position needs less care but earns less. Orca also fits token creators who want a new token to land in a known pool, and issuers of regulated assets who need a market with KYC rules.

For plain swaps, an aggregator will route through Orca's pools anyway, so you may get the same or a better price there. Trading on Orca directly makes most sense for tokens whose main pool lives on Orca. The site names PYUSD, cbBTC and JTO as tokens that launched there.

Permissioned pools are only open if you pass the issuer's KYC. If you hold ORCA or xORCA, follow the forum, since the share of fees paid to stakers may change and the October 2026 vote result was not confirmed when we checked.

Orca vs Raydium, Meteora and Jupiter

Orca, Raydium and Meteora are all Solana AMMs, the pool-based kind of exchange. They fight for the same LP deposits and the same trades from aggregators. Jupiter is a different kind of app: it sends trades through all three. Orca makes sense for its LP tools and for pools that hold regulated assets. Raydium or Meteora make sense when the token you want trades mainly there.

The three AMMs overlap a lot, so the gaps are in the details. Orca stands out for its Adaptive Fees and its closed pools for regulated assets. Formation also pitches a path to borrow against those assets on Loopscale. For most traders, the aggregator makes the choice. It sends each swap to whichever pool gives the best price.

Orca founders, funding and history

Yutaro Mori and Grace "Ori" Kwan co-founded Orca, which launched in February 2021. Kwan had worked at IDEO and Coursera. Mori had worked on Ethereum 2.0 and UMA.

Orca first ran on a grant from the Solana Foundation. In September 2021, The Block reported an $18 million Series A co-led by Three Arrows Capital, Polychain Capital and Placeholder. CoinDesk named Michael Hwang as Orca's CEO in May 2026.

After the merger, Orca's X account named Luke Truitt as Orca's new CEO. By then Orca had handled more than $550 billion in trades since launch, according to Formation.