Q1: First, please ask Yibo to give a brief introduction to the Orca project
A1: Orca is the most user-friendly DEX on Solana. It is an exchange that has pure AMM functions and can trade and provide LP in the most user-friendly way. Pure AMM means we have our own liquidity pool, which is extremely beneficial to integrators, traders and LPs. Our long-term vision is to empower anyone to efficiently leverage their capital to exchange assets, provide liquidity and earn yield through an easy-to-use interface. We plan to achieve this vision by innovating at the AMM level while collaborating with other projects in the Solana ecosystem to become the core "money LEGO". The two problems that Orca hopes to solve in the short term are: 1) Allow LPs to participate passively and earn fees by pooling liquidity; 2) Make it easier for Ethereum users to transfer assets to Solana using a customized UI/UX on top of Wormhole . To address this, Orca will launch Whirlpools, which can pool liquidity, and a set of strategies that can be used to passively manage LP positions.
Q2: Please introduce the Orca core team
A2: Orca's core team is a lean team consisting of 11 people. Earlier this year, Yutaro Mori and Grace Kwan (Ori) co-founded Orca. At present, six engineers in the Orca team, including Yutaro, all graduated from Stanford, Michigan-Ann Arbor, or the University of Waterloo, which are famous for computer science, and have worked in leading Internet companies such as Amazon and Google. The members of the strategic team including Ori are also full of talents. They not only have many graduates from top foreign universities, but also have years of deep experience in business consulting, design, and financial fields. Next, let's introduce the background of several members of the team in detail:
Yutaro is an experienced software engineer with extensive experience in blockchain protocols. Before Orca, he worked for Ethereum 2.0 and UMA, and worked in the database architecture company MongoDB for many years. He has deep experience and insights in blockchain technology, mathematics, and macroeconomics.
Grace is a generalist who can adeptly switch back and forth between the roles of software engineer and user experience designer. She is good at introducing user-friendly design to complex technical infrastructure. She holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before founding Orca, she worked for many years in the well-known educational technology company Coursera and the world's top design company IDEO.
Milan, Director of Market Business Development: Before joining encryption in 2017, Milan was a consultant in McKinsey's New York office, focusing on financial institutions and the education industry. He then learned to code and built a payment system using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Before joining Orca, he was a technical product manager, focusing on ETH 2.0, and built staking infrastructure on more than 40 Pos chains.
Kiko, Director of Operations and Growth: She has many years of experience in management consulting, product design and management, and company operations. Her growth and work trajectory spanned three continents. In addition to the profound business background accumulated in Deloitte, Mattel, IDEO and other companies, she also has a lot of understanding and insight into Eastern and Western cultures.
Other engineers on our project also have years of work experience in companies such as Google and Amazon.
Q3: The decentralized exchange track is quite hot and the competition is fierce. What is the reason why Orca has won the favor of top international investment institutions, and can you specifically talk about the financing situation?
A3: As Chris Burniske, partner at Placeholder, said: "Not only is Orca responsive and has low transaction fees, but it is also a rare and interesting product in the financial world: it has a pleasant user experience, a community, and a wider community based on The mission of value. It is a team like Orca that brings encryption technology into the mainstream and redefines the way we look at finance in our daily lives." I think this is why Orca can be favored by investment institutions and users. We have completed more than 18 million US dollars in financing this time! The investment was led by Polychain, Placeholder and Three Arrows Capital, with Jump Capital, Sino Global Capital, Collab & Currency, DeFiance, Zee Prime, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Capital and other angel investors following up. These investors will pave the way for Orca and work hand in hand with us on the journey of "making Orca the first choice for Solana's ecological transactions"!
Q4: DEX represented by Uniswap is taking the lead in DeFi. In your opinion, what are the shortcomings of the DEXs on the market today to achieve rapid development? What efforts has Orca made or is making to this end? What is the biggest difference between you and other players on the same track?
A4: Existing DEXs, such as Uniswap, are great, they are great inventions in the crypto world. The problems we see and believe we are well equipped to solve are: 1. Make it easier for passive LPs to earn income; 2. Improve the overall user experience of trading and DEX; 3. Make it as simple as possible to participate in integration. On the first point, becoming an LP of Orca is already easy. As DEXs start to have more complex functions, such as pooling liquidity, we are building Whirlpools to enable passive LPs to seek out strategies to manage their positions for them. This is more useful on chains like Solana, where you can restructure LP positions multiple times due to lower transaction costs. In terms of Swap and DEX experience, this is where we focus the most. With the implementation of Orca's fair price indicator, "Your Tokens" panel, and Magic Bar, we believe it is the most user-friendly DEX on Solana. We will continue to improve the experience by opening more wallet support and new trading pairs. Finally, on the integration front, we released the Typescript SDK, which makes it very simple to build and query pool data on top of Orca. I'm really looking forward to seeing what our dev team creates next! ! We will also have Orca grants to help support some idea people and builders.
Q5: Can you introduce Orca's recent roadmap? What are the key plans for the future?
A5: For some time in the future, we will work hard to develop from three aspects: product, integrated development and community. First of all, for products, we will strive to make Orca the most powerful and user-friendly AMM on Solana. More tokens and dual mining pools will be launched, so that everyone can exchange their favorite tokens. Also through Whirlpools users will be able to pool their liquidity within specific price ranges. This will benefit all Orca users: liquidity providers will earn higher yields and traders will be able to trade at lower costs. For integrated development, we will upgrade the SDK so that developers can take full advantage of centralized liquidity. For the latest updates, check it out on GitHub! In the meantime we will continue to work with other protocols to integrate our trades so they can benefit from our current competitive rates and even better rates through Whirlpools!
For the community, we will launch the Orca for everyone series of content in Medium to better guide new users on how to use and join cryptocurrency. (At present, we have launched the first issue. Interested friends are welcome to learn about the exchange.) At the same time, we will launch more centralized exchanges, so that more users can obtain ORCA tokens more conveniently. We're also launching our ambassador program to help everyone use Orca. Known as the Dolphin Ambassadors, members will help increase Orca's popularity in Solana and the wider world.
For more information about Orca, you can join our official tg group in Chinese:https://t.me/Orcazwsq
Q6: It is important to teach new users to get them up to speed faster. What information or teaching will Orca provide to help new users learn?
A6: Being the portal for all users is definitely our goal. We've achieved this so far with well-written documentation (http://docs.orca.so) and an intuitive UI with educational tooltips. For example, when using Orca, you will see a fair price indicator which compares the price you received with the price on CoinGecko. When depositing money into a pool, you will see a guide about unpaid losses. We are also trying to do more video tutorials, and in the near future we will be expanding this further with a blog series called "Orca for Everyone" which will include some introductory topics such as how to get started with Solana. We will also be hosting more AMAs and producing different types of educational materials such as video guides for upcoming Whirlpools releases!
Q7: Most investors are only interested in the short-term benefits of the project, and are indifferent to the long-term benefits. How does your team attract new investors and keep members engaged with the project long-term?
A7: We have quite a few ideas to attract long-term and broader investors and users. For example, we focus on quickly listing new tokens and building the best liquidity for those tokens. This attracts new users and liquidity providers, while also expanding the range of tradable assets on Orca. We will also launch more advanced product types, such as Whirlpools, with the goal of attracting advanced traders and liquidity providers, while maintaining the UI that our users love, and allowing everyone to continue trading on Orca.
Q8: I would like to know how the Orca team will empower Orca tokens to benefit those long-term holders? Let investors have greater confidence to buy Orca tokens instead of mining and selling.
A8: Our main focus is on growth, both in terms of users and transaction volume, and use ORCA tokens to achieve this. The Orca token will directly benefit by increasing transaction volume and the number of Orca users. We have explored ORCA staking and will continue to investigate the possibility of other better uses of the ORCA treasury. Additionally, our focus in the coming quarters will be on establishing ORCA governance, which will attract more people to participate in the Orca ecosystem.
Q9: Does Orca have plans to launch IDO and NTF markets?
A9: Our goal is to create the best general-purpose AMM DEX. We currently have no plans to launch an IDO or NFT marketplace, but we are actively working with IDO platforms to quickly list new and high-demand tokens. We will also explore cooperation with NFT marketplaces for Orca integration!
