A dive into the future of the Orca Treasury, Impact Fund, swap fees, and the ORCA token!
Welcome to the first edition of the Orca Treasury Report: A series detailing the state of the Orca Treasury, Impact Fund, swap fees, and the ORCA token.
Let’s dive in!
1. The Orca Treasury & Fees
First off, a quick refresher on how our Treasury works:
- On Orca’s standard pools, 0.05% of every swap on constant product pools and 0.01% of stable pools goes to the Orca Treasury. (Additional details can be found in our docs).
- There are currently zero Treasury fees charged for swaps on Whirlpools, Orca’s new concentrated liquidity pools. The resulting reduction in overall fees incentivize higher liquidity and, in turn, higher trading volume.
- In the future, governance may implement changes to either of these fee models.
As of April 2022, the Orca Treasury contains just over $6 million worth of SPL tokens, most of which are LP tokens for Orca’s largest standard pools. (You can take a look at the current distribution here.)
20% of the Orca Treasury is donated to causes fighting climate change and protecting the environment via the Orca Impact Fund, which we’ll explore further below. As for the remaining 80%, that’s still to be determined — we welcome suggestions from our community via our governance forums. Check out forums.orca.so for the latest! 😉
2. The Impact Fund
As part of Orca’s commitment to making a real-world impact, 20% of the fees earned by the Treasury go to organizations working to protect the environment via the Orca Impact Fund.
We’ll soon be making our first ever donation through the Impact Fund. Shortly after the launch of the ORCA token, we held our first ever “proto-governance” vote to determine which of two organizations should receive the donation. The worthy recipient chosen by our community is Ocean Conservancy!
Since then, Orca has been working closely with Ocean Conservancy to determine which of their current initiatives will benefit the most from the additional funds. We aim to make a joint announcement of the donation by the end of Q2.
To support a smooth donation process, the funds donated shall be converted to USDC in advance of the donation. (As you can imagine, communicating with potential recipients can be challenging when the proposed value of the donation is constantly fluctuating!) Going forward, we’ll convert the tokens allocated to the Impact Fund to stables on a quarterly basis.
If there’s a values-aligned charity that you think should be a future recipient of the Impact Fund, don’t hesitate to let us know in the #impact-fund channel of the Orca Discord!
To learn more about the Impact Fund, check out Episode 2 of our podcast, OrcaPod, where co-founders Ori and Yutaro discuss its origins!
3. The ORCA token
Lastly, a quick update on the ORCA governance token.
Of the 100 million ORCA tokens in existence, over 81 million remain in the initial source wallet. Before the fundraise, we used the following labels to describe the distribution of the ORCA token:
Since then, we’ve made a few updates to better reflect the current distribution:
- We may separate the ORCA tokens allocated to our team (20%), Series A investors (9.6%) and advisors (0.9%) from the source wallet and storing them in a centralized exchange. This would purely be to preserve the recipients’ privacy, with no changes to vesting schedules.
- While the Community & Team allocations will not change, we’ve updated the remaining labels to reflect the precise amounts allocated. The 9.6% of tokens allocated to Series A investors will be separated from “Investment” and the remaining 3.4% will be combined with the “Advisor” allocation to create Value-add + Advisory, per the pie chart below.
- The new Value-add + Advisory category will be used to grow Orca through a combination of channels. Value-add can include various programs, such as encouraging developers to build on top of Orca through our Builders program and bringing aboard community leaders that want to grow with Orca. Advisors refers to subject area experts who can contribute to the growth of the Orca protocol. Our current advisors include e^{i} Ventures (veterans of the DeFi space), Austin Virts (Current Head of Crypto/Marketing at Audius, former Head of Marketing at Solana), and Reverie (leading decentralized governance activists).
So far, we have gradually decentralized ownership of the protocol by incentivizing liquidity provision through ORCA rewards on our Aquafarms. The launch of Whirlpools enables users to earn higher rewards for providing liquidity more efficiently, which allows the protocol to distribute fewer rewards overall. As a result, we will move towards zero rewards on our old pools and increase rewards in our Whirlpools to ensure that users continue to have a great experience.
And as we roll out Orca Governance, use of the Community allocation will increasingly be placed in the capable fins of our users. We look forward to seeing how the protocol evolves! 🐳
Disclaimer: Communications from Orca are intended solely for informational purposes, and should not be construed as investment or trading advice and are not meant to be a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital assets mentioned. All figures are estimated and unaudited unless otherwise noted. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Transactions on the blockchain are speculative. Carefully consider and accept all risks, including risk of loss of all funds and extreme volatility of token prices and liquidity, before taking any action. As a technology company, Orca provides access to software.
