Explain Orca in detail, this may be the DEX with the best user experience
In September of this year, an AMM-based DEX based on SolanaOrcaAnnounced the completion of the A-round financing of US$18 million. Three star institutions including Polychain, Placeholder, and Three Arrows Capital jointly led the investment, and other institutions such as Sino Global, Collab+Currency, Coinbase Ventures, and Solana Capital participated in the investment.
After more than two months, Orca is now on the Solana ecological DeFi protocol lockup value list (data taken fromDeFi llama) has quietly risen to fifth place. Excluding the liquidity staking protocol Marinade Finance, the order-thin exchange Serum, and the liquidity mining aggregator Quarry, Orca has grown into the AMM-type DEX with the second largest lockup value on Solana, second only to Raydium, which is personally endorsed by SBF.
DEX for people, not programs
Orca literally translates to Killer Whale, the strongest and smartest creature in the ocean.
Orca has a core team of 11 people, and two co-founders, Yutaro Mori and Grace Kwan (called Ori in the community), lead the development team and strategy team respectively.
Yutaro is a senior cryptocurrency developer who has participated in the development of the ETH 2.0 Golang client and the well-known synthetic asset protocol UMA. Including Yutaro, Orca's development team has a total of 6 developers. Most of the members graduated from Stanford, Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Waterloo and other universities famous for computer science, and have working experience in leading Internet companies such as Amazon and Google. .
Ori received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University, and worked as an interaction designer at IDEO Tokyo, a top design company. Orca's little whale logo was drawn by Grace. Including Ori, Orca's strategic team consists of 5 people, and most of the members have working experience in top business consulting and design agencies such as McKinsey, Deloitte, and IDEO.
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Note: Orca's official Twitter also claims to be the most user-friendly exchange on Solana, which is not an exaggeration.
In Orca's view, an excellent trading platform needs to effectively meet the needs of users, and from the perspective of users, its needs are nothing more than three dimensions: faster execution speed, more ideal exchange quotes, and more convenient operation experience . So what exactly does Orca do about it?
1. Faster execution speed:
As mentioned earlier, Orca chose Solana as the underlying public chain. In Orca's view, Solana's theoretical processing capacity of 50,000 TPS, average block time of 400 ms, and extremely low transaction costs close to zero make it the best choice among public chains. With the help of Solana's excellent performance, transactions on Orca will be able to settle at a sub-second speed, thus bringing users a more "smooth" transaction experience.
In addition to the execution speed at the contract level, Orca has achieved something that many other DEXs have overlooked - front-end interface optimization. This point is recommended for everyone to experience and compare. From the author's personal perception, the smoothness of Orca's front-end interface can be said to be the benchmark level in DeFi, and every step of the operation will be responded in a very short time.
2. More ideal exchange offer:
The ideal quotation is the core demand of traders. Orca will adopt completely different price curves when dealing with different types of tokens. For non-stable currency trading pairs, Orca chooses the most classic AMM model to ensure more flexible price discovery capabilities; while for stable currency trading pairs , Orca uses a stable swap curve similar to Curve to reduce the impact of slippage on large transactions.
In order to further ensure the reasonableness of the price, Orca has introduced a new mechanism on this basis - the Fair Price Indicator (Fair Price Indicator). When executing a transaction on Orca, the protocol will check whether two indicators can be satisfied at the same time: first, the difference between the exchange price and the quotation on CoinGecko is less than 1%, and second, the impact of this transaction on the price of the token is not greater than 1%.
When the above two indicators are met at the same time, Orca's transaction page will prompt that this is a "fair price". Choose to continue trading or stop trading.
3. More convenient operation experience:
Operating experience is actually a rather subjective concept. Every user has his or her own preferred operating method. However, in the encrypted world, since the operating mode of pioneer AMM DEX such as Uniswap has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, it is necessary to be careful when doing any optimization. Otherwise, it is likely to backfire.
What is commendable about Orca is that while the trading platform maintains the classic AMM DEX operation mode, it also adds some small tools that are easy for users to operate. Just give two examples.
On the far right side of the Orca front-end interface, users can see a small arrow icon. By default, the content behind the arrow will be hidden, and after clicking the arrow, a display board will appear, where users can see the real-time balance of all Orca tokens in their wallets, helping users to timely Track the changes in assets in your wallet.
Right above the exchange window, Orca also designed a shortcut bar. The function of this shortcut bar is that when users want to exchange a specific amount or quantity of tokens, they can directly enter the corresponding number in the shortcut bar. This bar Feedback will be quickly given to multiple trading pairs. After the user selects (click Input swap) the corresponding trading pair, the relevant exchange information will be directly displayed in the exchange window, and the operation can be completed by clicking Confirm.
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DeFi for future
In Orca’s view, while maintaining daily stable operations and ensuring service quality, DeFi project parties should also take the initiative to undertake some additional obligations and promote the prospects of the entire industry through some practical measures.
Speaking of this, I have to mention Orcanauts, a series of NFT collections jointly launched by Orca and artist Cori Huang. This collection consists of 10,000 unique marine life NFTs. Holders of NFTs will have the opportunity to stay closer with the Orca team. In close contact, you can even directly talk to the founding team to provide your own opinions on the development of the protocol. For Orca, Orcanauts is the first step in its exploration of the Orcaverse (Orcaverse), and the protocol will also use this as a basis to explore the potential combination of NFTs + DeFi.
The reason why this project is specifically mentioned is because Orca made a very popular choice in the sale of Orcanauts-donating all the proceeds belonging to the team to Aflatoun International, a DeFi education organization.
Specifically, in addition to 25% of the proceeds attributable to artist Cori Huang, Orca will donate the remaining 75% of all proceeds to support the long-term career development of Aflatoun International. Aflatoun International is a non-profit organization that aims to promote DeFi education to teenagers all over the world. The organization will use Orca's donation to produce a series of educational courses to help more teenagers understand DeFi.
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Next step: active market making?
Earlier, Orca officially disclosed the agreement's winter development plan.
According to the plan, Orca will make a major upgrade to its own AMM model in the near future, break the fixed passive market-making mechanism, and explore active market-making. The so-called active market-making means that the agreement will allow liquidity providers (LPs) to actively choose the price range. In this way, LPs will be able to use the same amount of funds to capture greater market-making benefits, which in turn will also increase The utilization efficiency of funds in the pool provides trading users with lower slippage.
The concept of active market-making was first developed in Uniswap v3, but because the core code of Uniswap v3 is copyrighted by the Business Source License (BSL), improper commercial use is restricted within two years, so after v3 was released for so long, although the market can see its Excellent effect, but it cannot be called directly by fork like before.
Orca was able to predict the update of this step in advance, obviously it has found its own solution path, and is confident to complete the relevant code by itself, but since the update has not yet been implemented, we are temporarily unable to learn about the agreement’s active market-making mechanism and Uniswap v3. What's the difference.
However, for Orca, a cutting-edge DEX that is gaining momentum, we will definitely pay close attention to its latest trends, and readers are requested to stay tuned.
