Orca DEX plans buybacks and token staking
Solana’s third-largest DEX has planned staking for September
FreshPaint/Orca/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
ORCA is up 19.6% on the week as the Orca DAO prepares to deploy its treasury assets toward a token buyback initiative.
The governance proposal, which opened for voting last Wednesday, would see the staking of treasury assets into the Orca validator node.
Then the Orca Council will withdraw assets when “deemed appropriate” to conduct buybacks over the next 24 months.
As of today, Orca’s treasury holds 55,127 SOL ($9.9 million) and 503k USDC.
The vote for the proposal ends in about 24 hours, and is likely to pass with currently a 100% “yes” response and a 51% quorum already met.
Orca is Solana’s third-largest DEX, with about $19-20 billion in July trading volumes.
On a YTD basis, Orca has generated about $115 million in fees.
50% of these fees go toward protocol development, while 30% are directed to the treasury wallet that fuels ORCA buybacks should the aforementioned governance proposal pass.
The remaining 20% of fees are allocated to a separate ongoing ORCA buyback initiative that will eventually go toward ORCA staking.
The Orca team told me that staking is slated for launch in September, so that’s two potential value accrual streams for ORCA token holders in the near term.
On a market cap-to-revenue basis, ORCA trades about 24% lower (7.36x) than RAY (9.63x), which may suggest some relative upside for ORCA if revenues are consistent.
But that’s a big if when you take into account the rise of prop AMMs on Solana that points to an increasingly hyper-competitive and commoditized DEX landscape.
Orca isn’t resting on its laurels, though. The team also launched Wavebreak in beta two weeks ago, a memecoin launchpad built on Orca’s own proprietary in-house tech stack.
Compared to your average launchpad, Orca’s Wavebreak is designed to be “human-first,” meaning tokens in the bonding phase are designed to be protected from sniper bots.
Outside of Solana, Orca is also the dominant DEX on the SVM-based Ethereum L2 chain, Eclipse. Orca’s Eclipse deployment has far lower usage than Solana, though — about 93 million in July volumes vs. 20 billion on Solana.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
- Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
- Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
- The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
- Lightspeed: All things Solana.
- Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
