Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and automated market makers (AMMs) recently launched Vortex pools, enabling protocol users to access centralized liquidity pools. Shortly after, the popular web3 lifestyle app STEPN integrated Orca’s pool to power its transactions. As a result, usage of the protocol has reached an all-time high.
In early May 2022, Orca (defined as unique wallets with fewer than 20 transactions per day to filter arbitrage wallets) surpassed 130,000 daily users, far more than any other exchange on Solana.
At the beginning of this month, DEX users on Solana had about 160,000 unique addresses per day, and Orca accounted for more than 70% of the share. This is in stark contrast to Orca's closest competitors, Raydium (8.3%) and Serum (6.7%).
The surge in trading activity has led to a corresponding surge in Swap volume. In 2022, Orca will be worth more than $9 billion in transactions, about half of which occurred in the last month.
Orca's dominance isn't surprising to longtime users. Its rare combination of intuitive user experience and cutting-edge technology gives it broad appeal among DeFi newcomers and experienced users alike. Not to mention Orca’s real-world impact; about 0.01% of Swap fees will go towards climate change and sustainable development through the Orca Impact Fund.
Another factor in Orca's success is its composability. Just as Orca's interface was designed for usability, Orca's open source software development kit (SDK) is designed for easy integration into other applications. This has led to protocols like STEPN integrating Orca "inside" to provide users with convenient transactions. But these are just stepping stones for Solana's "Apex AMM." The newly released Whirlpool technology allows liquidity providers to earn higher fees with less liquidity, improving the price of trades and making the market within Solana more efficient overall.
In the coming months, Orca plans to move all existing funding pools to Vortex and launch community permissionless pools, allowing anyone in the ecosystem to launch a centralized liquidity pool "permission-free". This will make Orca the base liquidity layer for all tokens in Solana. The vortex pool smart contract has been double-audited by Kudelski and Neodyme and will be open-sourced in May 2022. Meanwhile, the Vortex Pool SDK allows developers to easily incorporate the power of centralized liquidity, and is already being used by popular aggregator Jupiter.
In the near future, Orca will encourage developers to integrate whirlpools in their upcoming Builders program. Potential integrations include leveraged mining for protocols like Tulip, efficient trading for NFTs, and automated centralized liquidity strategies known as “Vaults.”
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