Orca is Uniswap V3 on Solana thanks to open source code, Grants

• “We’re just on a lower fee chain that works very much like Ethereum,” Milan Patel, head of business development at Orca, told Blockworks
• Ethereum remains the dominant blockchain for DeFi applications with a total locked value (TVL) of $34.1 billion

Orca, an Automated Market Maker (AMM) on the Solana blockchain, has announced the winners of Wave 1 of its Whirlpools Builders Program.

The first version of Orca was similar to Uniswap V2 – an AMM that allows Liquidity Providers (LPs) to facilitate trading at all prices.

Whirlpool, a “concentrated liquidity” feature launched in March this year, is similar to the Ethereum-powered Uniswap V3, which allows LPs to choose a price range when depositing their tokens, said Milan Patel, head of business development at Orca. versus Blockworks.

Concentrated liquidity means LPs can provide liquidity at any price range, allowing them to generate higher returns and traders to trade at lower costs.

“Similar to Charm, Gamma and Arrakis [on Ethereum], we want to build something similar for us on Solana,” Patel said. “We want to improve the usability of hot tubs and expand their functionality.”

And so, Orca launched its funding initiative, the Whirlpools Builders Program, to get protocols on Solana to leverage its concentrated liquidity pools and find new uses. A total of 11 projects received $225,000 in grants, including:

• Tulip: a concentrated vault of liquidity that reduces divergence losses and auto-compounds rewards.
• Kamino: a vault that offers Liquidity Providers (LP) the benefits of concentrated liquidity without continuous rebalancing.
• Investin: Vaults with active liquidity provision run by vault managers. LPs could monitor activity through an interface showing vault locations and performance charts.

“I think a lot of grant programs choose a protocol and give them a very big grant, but this is DeFi, everyone should get a grant and everyone should build, and whoever executes the best, we will support them to get more users . That’s why we have 11 grants, even if they’re a little smaller,” Patel said.

Orca hopes the push to encourage builders to innovate through the Whirlpools Builders program will bring more DeFi users to the Solana blockchain.

Currently, Ethereum remains the dominant DeFi blockchain, with the total value (TVL) of all applications reaching $34.1 billion at the time of writing.

In comparison, Solana’s TVL is $1.44 billion, significantly less than the competing blockchain. Uniswap currently accounts for about 16% ($5.46 billion) of Ethereum’s TVL, and Orca’s existing TVL is about 6% of Solanas ($87.92 million).

Patel argued that the Orca team operates more like its Ethereum counterparts than most Solana developers since everything related to the project is open source, with the goal of growing the ecosystem through a grant program.

“There are a number of parallels between us and Uniswap V3,” Patel said. “We’re just on a lower fee chain that works very much like Ethereum.”

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• Bessie Liu

  blocks

  reporter

  Bessie is a New York-based crypto reporter who previously worked as a tech journalist for The Org. She received her Masters in Journalism from New York University after working as a management consultant for over two years. Bessie is originally from Melbourne, Australia. You can contact Bessie at [email protected]

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