Over the years, the cryptocurrency industry has come up with a number of ways to buy, sell, and swap coins and tokens, but crypto exchanges still remain the simplest and fastest one. However, pretty much all functional exchanges for nearly a decade used to be centralized, while early DEXes failed due to the lack of liquidity. No one would use them because they lacked liquidity, and they lacked liquidity because nobody would use them.
However, the crypto industry — and crypto community — were still strongly drawn by the idea of decentralization, so when the DeFi sector emerged, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) were among the first projects to blow up.
The only remaining issue was that they were not made to be very user-friendly and simple, which is why Orca (ORCA) emerged, hoping to change that.
How Does Orca (ORCA) Work
Orca is the easiest place to exchange digital currencies on Solana’s blockchain, and possibly beyond. It is a community-oriented exchange that has done everything in its power to make trading cryptocurrencies on its platform as easy and intuitive as it can possibly be so that even someone who is trading cryptocurrencies for the first time can easily find their way around.
It is an AMM that rewards its users by allowing them to engage in various DeFi activities, such as liquidity mining and yield farming. It also specifically chose Solana due to its high speeds and low transaction fees. It was also quite impressed by the team behind Solana, its value, vision, and engineering chops.
Orca has its native cryptocurrency, the ORCA token, which was launched in August 2021. The token has a total supply of 100 million units, and nearly two-thirds were allocated to the community through various means.
What Problems Does Orca (ORCA) Solve?
Orca emerged with the goals of solving several issues that are troubling the crypto space, and particularly, investors and traders who need a safe and user-friendly place to buy, sell and exchange their coins and tokens.
Decentralized swaps
Like all DEXes, Orca’s first and biggest goal is to provide users with a decentralized place where they can do their trading and investing. After all, the cryptocurrency industry has gone to great lengths to ensure that coins would be truly decentralized, and all those that are not decentralized are facing harsh daily criticism. With that said, it makes little sense for them to use centralized exchanges that require users to deposit money and coins that they wish to trade.
Without holding the keys themselves, centralized exchange users are not the sole holders of their funds, and to them, that means that they are not the real owners of the funds. DEXes like Orca allow users to swap their cryptos from their own private wallets, meaning that the exchange only provides a place to do the swapping, and it does not act as a custodian. Therefore, it cannot freeze users’ funds or take possession of their coins under any circumstances.
Ease of use
One thing that makes Orca unique even among DEXes is the ease of use that the exchange can offer. It is the simplest DEX on Solana’s blockchain, allowing users to exchange tokens with a click of a button. In fact, it claims that it offers lower fees and latency than any DEX on Ethereum, and that includes Uniswap. At the same time, users have access to fair prices.
This is the best deal that any newcomer to the industry can find among decentralized exchanges, which is why Orca should definitely be a platform for them to check out and consider when selecting their exchange.
AMM
There are two major types of exchanges in the crypto industry — traditional orderbook exchanges and AMMs, or Automated Market Makers. The former uses orderbooks to match users who are looking to buy with those looking to sell similar amounts.
However, AMMs work in a different way. Users trade with a pool of tokens, instead of with other users directly. This means that users who wish to buy are drawing from the pool, while those who wish to sell are adding to it, so both groups can have their orders completed right away.
Benefits of Orca (ORCA)
Orca was developed to help the users in any way it can, and that doesn’t only mean offering an easy-to-use platform. Instead, Orca threw in some additional benefits for users.
Earning rewards
The first thing to note is that Orca allows its users to use their money in order to earn more money. It does so by utilizing other helpful DeFi activities, such as yield farming and liquidity mining. Essentially, if users are willing to lock up some of their coins into the project’s liquidity pool, they will be able to earn a portion of the transaction fees as a reward for their contribution.
Financial tools
The DEX offers some very helpful financial tools that are there to ensure that traders will always know how good of a deal they are getting with Orca. One of the most notable ones is the Fair Price Indicator, which shows the difference between the quoted price by Orca and crypto price-tracking websites, such as CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.
Community-oriented tokenomics
Finally, it should be noted that Orca is very community-oriented, and so are its tokenomics. The exchange has allocated nearly two-thirds of its total 100 million tokens to the community, including liquidity providers, incentives, airdrops, and more.
Bottom Line
The cryptocurrency industry is constantly growing, and new users are continuously finding their way into it. Many of them quickly learn of the current trends, things to do in crypto, and alike, which eventually leads them to the DeFi sector, and decentralized exchanges.
However, the UI of many of these platforms is not intuitive and understandable, as DEXes are still young, plus many of them lack the funding of centralized exchanges. Not to mention the fact that a lot of DEXes target experienced investors and traders, who do not need such simplified software.
Orca emerged to change that and provide the best possible UX for all of its users, be they experts or first-time traders. So, anyone who had a negative experience with decentralized exchanges should give them another chance by visiting Orca and trying to trade on a decentralized platform again. And if you are brand new, then Orca is definitely the right place to start.
