Trader FAQs
If you have questions related to liquidity provison, then please see Liquidity Provider FAQs. If your question is not covered, please ask on Discord in #🤔│questions-and-feedback.
Orca is the easiest place to trade cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain. On Orca, you can trade tokens cheaply, quickly, and confidently (thanks to the Fair Price Indicator) and with low slippage (thanks to the capital efficiency of Orca's CLAMM pools). Additionally, you can provide liquidity to Orca's concentrated liquidity (CLAMM) pools to earn trading fees and token emissions.
There are two major ways to trade cryptocurrencies: traditional orderbook exchanges (CLOBs) and automated market maker (AMM/CLAMM) protocols. Orderbooks look to match sellers and buyers based on price and amount of tokens to trade. In AMMs users trade against a pool of tokens, rather than directly with other users.
For blockchain applications, Orca believes that CLAMM-based trading protocols are the superior approach because of their simplicity and composability and that with proper education and the right tools a CLAMM can achieve everything a CLOB can and more.
Of the solutions competing to scale the blockchain ecosystem, Solana's performance stands out: 50,000 transactions per second, 400ms block times, and low transaction fees. What’s more, Orca has been continually impressed by the value, vision, and engineering chops of the Solana team. For these reasons, Orca believes that Solana is the best choice to support the next generation of DeFi apps.
The ORCA governance token was launched on 9th August 2021. See the Tokenomics page for more details. For details of Orca's governance process please see the Governance User Guide.
ORCA is available on many exchanges globally, including, amongst others, Coinbase, Kraken, MEXC, and Gate. A more complete and up-to-date list is available on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.
Orca does not solicit exchange listings of the ORCA token. However, from time-to-time, centralized exchanges may choose to list ORCA, based on their market analyses or community feedback. When exchanges list ORCA, they will generally make announcements of such listings, and they will be added to the list of ORCA markets on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.
To connect to Orca you will need a compatible wallet, a list of currently supported wallets can be found here.
Orca plans to integrate other wallets that support Solana program execution, as they are released.
Orca cannot and does not endorse nor guarantee the security of compatible wallets. Podmates should exercise caution and do their own research before interacting with or depositing to any wallet.
SOL is required to pay network fees. It is recommended to maintain a balance of at least 0.05 SOL. Actual fees are typically far lower, but for simplicity, a small minimum balance of SOL is required to transact.
Orca's uses concentrated liquidity pools, similar to (but not identical to) Uniswap v3. Each liquidity provider chooses a range within which to provide liquidity: trades are executed using the combined liquidity of all individual in-range curves.
- Taker fee: When trading, a percentage of the trade value is paid as a fee. These fees vary depending on the routing of your trade. The table here shows the fee paid when trading on Orca, and how it is split between earnings for liquidity providers, Orca Treasury (currently the treasury takes no fees), and Climate Fund.
- Network fee: when trading a nominal amount of SOL is also paid in the form of Solana network fees. The exact amount varies depending on the parameters of the trade; when trading a token for the first time, more SOL is required to add that token to your wallet. In the past, typically trades cost between 0.0001 — 0.001 SOL. More details about network fees can be found here.
Orca does not charge any additional fees.
When you enter a trade, there are two factors that determine whether a Fair price label is displayed:
- 1.Is the price per token within 1% of the rate quoted by CoinGecko?
- 2.Is the price impact caused by this trade less than 1%?
If either of these conditions is not met, you'll see the Rate Warning!, Price Impact Warning, or Great Price! alert in the UI. When a warning label is displayed you can still trade after acknowledging the warning.
The trade price on Orca depends on the size of the order. As the amount of tokens you buy from the pool increases, the price of the token increases as well. This increase in price is called price impact.
If your trade causes price impact of 1% or greater the UI will display a Price Impact Warning. You can still trade after acknowledging the warning.
The trade will fail if the price of the underlying pools moves past your Slippage Tolerance settings. Increasing the tolerance in local settings will raise the chances of your trade succeeding, but also increase the probability of another party front-running your trade.
Due to current smart-contract limitations, trades that route through multiple pools have a higher likelihood of failing due to slippage. The transaction may succeed if sent again. Orca recognizes that this can be frustrating, so plans are in the works to improve the logic for trades that use multiple pools.
Orca has implemented automatic priority fees so during periods of Solana network congestion transactions are less likely to fail.
Orca will add tokens to the Orca Token List based on information provided by the project and demonstrable community demand (e.g. volume or interest). Orca is a decentralized protocol that facilitates trades and and will aim to support every asset that is tradable on Solana. Anyone can create a pool.
Some tokens on Orca are wrapped, including BTC, ETH, AVAX, LUNA, Celo, and FTM. There are several source protocols for wrapped tokens, please ensure to Do Your Own Research.
To trade ERC-20s on Orca, you’ll need to convert them to SPL tokens by transferring them through a bridge, it is important to do your own research before wrapping tokens.
As a trader, there is nothing that need be done to take advantage of Orca's concentrated liquidity pools; all the magic happens behind the scenes.
Of course! You can interact with pools using Typescript SDK. Please visit the Orca Developer Portal and #dev-resources. Developer Advocates are on standby in the #dev-questions channel in the Orca Discord, you can ask technical questions there!
Last modified 21d ago