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New Orca FAQs

Head over to Trader FAQs for general queries about trading, this section answers questions specifically relating to New Orca.

What is new Orca?

New Orca is the smoothest, fastest and most reliable incarnation of Orca yet. A new, innovative, UI for traders to tap into Orca’s liquidity: the apex liquidity layer on Solana. Orca will continue to deliver an easy-to-integrate, capital-efficient, permissionless trading environment. Feel the difference and dive into a human-centered UI that is built to just work.

Why build a new Orca at all?

Orca has driven $34.7b in all-time volume and earned the majority of fees on Solana (75% over the 6 months prior to the launch of new Orca) and all while raising over $1.6m the Orca Climate Fund, and Orca has never been hacked. So, why build a new, radically different interface?
Crypto has the potential to bring efficiency, transparency, and verifiability to global financial markets. But for mass adoption to happen, the experience of buying and selling tokens on-chain must be not only on par with TradFi, but meaningfully better.
So, Orca is making an audacious bet:
  1. 1.
    Concentrated liquidity AMMs (CLAMMs) will be the innovation that enables mainstream adoption.
  2. 2.
    Solana will be the chain to power that revolution.
For that bet to pan out, the basic building blocks of finance—buying and selling assets—must feel familiar enough for everyday people to use and that’s where the new Orca comes in.

Why now?

Time and tide wait for none. Orca believes that Web3's path to 1 billion users demands a great UX. Orca seeks to set new standards with an attractive, polished visual redesign that looks and feels good to use.

What’s new?

Orca is known for its focus on human-centered design, a rarity in the world of crypto. However, until now, even Orca has catered for tech savvy, crypto-native users. The new Orca provides the features that make buying and selling crypto on-chain easy, even for normies: Dive in and explore the new features, including:
  • A new, more reliable and efficient smart router, you can count on fair prices, without high fees or failed transactions.
  • Integrated price charts: a gorgeous visual trend line, right there in clear view.
  • Recent transactions: see your past 5 trades.
  • Freshness Indicator: Auto-refresh every 10 seconds.
  • Improved genuinely helpful error messages.
  • NFT profile pictures.
  • Jupiter price comparison: if Jupiter’s price is better Orca will tell you.
  • Attractive polished visuals.

The trade modal is really different, why?

DeFi natives may find the interface unfamiliar—even jarring. Orca doesn’t swim with the crowd, Orca does not seek to merely onboard power users from Ethereum! To deliver a user experience that can lubricate web3 mass adoption Orca must serve the freshest Solana users on the block, catering to a range of use cases, including those yet to be dreamed of. New users who buy and sell crypto may not think of themselves as traders and the new Orca is designed to make their trades familiar, seamless, and—maybe even—just a little bit sexy.

How does the trade bar work?

There is a full how to guide for trading with the new trade bar, here.

How does the price comparison work?

Orca will check your trade against the quote provided by Jupiter v2, if v2 cannot provide a quote Orca will check Jupiter v1. See the table here for details of the price comparison tool messages and what they mean.

Is there a formula for the price comparison tools calculations?

Price Difference % = 100 * ((Best Competitor Price) - (Orca Price)) / (Best Competitor Price)
If the formula returns a negative value the Orca price is better.

Hang on, you said I can use NFTs as my profile picture, which collections are supported?

Orca currently supports some projects NFTs use as a pfp on new Orca. You can find an up-to-date list of supported projects, here. You can find a guide for changing your profile picture, here.

As a seasoned DeFi native, what's the benefit for me?

New Orca isn’t just a prancing show pony. It's also a leap forward in reliability and efficiency. During periods of high volatility on-chain trades often fail—right when success is most critical.
Beneath the surface, new Orca features a host of technical improvements:
  • An all-new front-end written in Next.js, which is slated to be open-sourced after the next major product release.
  • A custom Smart Router using up to 6 liquidity pools to provide optimal pricing.
  • Faster confirmation times and easier simple retry mechanism.
  • More accurate stats and price APIs.
  • Dynamic priority fees.
  • Orca will tell you if a competitor (via Jupiter) has a better price.
In contrast to most trading interfaces, these improvements ensure users need not fiddle with settings. Simply enter—buy 10 SOL with USDC—Orca takes care of the rest. Put simply: it just works.

Are fees different with new Orca?

No, fees have not changed, though since Orca deprecated legacy pools there are no pools currently carrying protocol fees, you can see details of fees here.

How does the new Orca price indicator work?

If the price Orca is different to that available from a competitor (via Jupiter) the trade bar will tell you, a link is included at the foot of the screen to buy via Jupiter.
These platforms are not endorsed by Orca, you may experience higher rates of transaction failure or be charged higher fees.

What does "spend at most" and "receive at least" mean in the trade details dropdown?

The displayed figure is the absolute maximum you will spend / absolute minimum you’ll receive, from your trade if slippage occurred to the maximum permitted extent. If slippage results in this figure being breached the trade will fail.

Where can I find more information on the fees displayed in the trade details dropdown?

A small portion of your trade goes to liquidity providers for the pools your trade routes through and a further portion to the Orca Climate Fund (details here). A further portion is network fees. The exact amount depends on the trade route. Orca itself does not charge a fee on your trade.

What is a sub-route?

New Orca's smart-router can route your trade through up to 6 channels to find you the best price. A sub-route is an indirect path for a trade such as ORCA>BONK>USDC, rather than trading directly between ORCA and USDC. Indirect trades like this are sometimes referred to as multihop trades. To find the best price Orca’s Smart Router can also split trades across multiple routes simultaneously, you can see how your trade is composed by expanding the sub-route dropdown.

Why is there no price chart for my trading pair?

If a liquidity pool does not exist for a pair, or contains insufficient liquidity, and there is insufficient data to construct a price chart, then one will not display. It may still be possible to trade the pair however.

I have spotted an issue, what should I do?

Orca is committed to continual improvement of new Orca and would love to hear your feedback or reports, head over to the #🐛│bug-reports channel and let us know.

My question isn’t covered, what can I do?

Orca will continue to refine these FAQs based on questions asked. Please head to #🤖│support-ticket to ask Orca's AI, Mava, or one of our CMs your question: they will endeavor to help. Orca is keen to improve these documents continually, your feedback, suggestions and questions are appreciated.

What's next for Orca?

Big things are coming: code-named Orca Pro.
It's years now since the first Concentrated Liquidity AMM launched, yet few tools exist for users to learn effective liquidity provision. Orca Pro will change that with:
  1. 1.
    Tutorials to learn the art of CLAMM liquidity provision
  2. 2.
    Tools to estimate returns effectively
Features designed to open up peer-to-peer market-making to a wider audience. Orca Pro will feel familiar to users of centralized exchanges (CEXs), reinforcing Orca’s controversial stance that CLAMMs can power the same experiences as order books—but with greater computational and capital efficiency.
But the journey to apex protocol doesn’t end there! There are additional projects in the works that will apply Orca’s core principles of human-centered design to new areas of finance. Probably nothing… 👀
Because no matter whether you’re a trader, market maker, or builder —
Orca makes it easy. 🐳