BUILD ON ORCA
Orca: Your GameFi Toolkit
Learn how top web3 games kickstart their development with Orca, the most dev-friendly liquidity toolkit on Solana.
Whether it’s Axie Infinity bringing families out of poverty, staggering 2000% year-on-year growth, or Meta’s controversial rebrand, the signs are impossible to ignore: web3 gaming is here.
What’s good news for gamers is a mixed bag for game developers. More eyes on the industry means more players, but also stiff competition. With the number of blockchain games doubling year-over-year, studios need every edge they can get to ship high-quality games, fast.
Building a blockchain game requires knowledge of both video game and web3 development — both intensive skills that call for specialized knowledge. Hiring an expert at both is like trying to catch a shiny Pokémon.
Luckily, there’s no need to break out the Master Ball: Orca has you covered!
From zero to game economy
Orca is the leading crypto trading platform on Solana. (Over the last 6 months, Orca drove more trade volume than any competing protocol by over 1 billion USD!) The Orca TypeScript SDK includes everything developers need to bridge the gap from web2 to web3:
- Build a custom marketplace: Enable players to buy/sell tokenized assets in-game
- Bootstrap liquidity: Create deep liquidity through Orca’s concentrated liquidity pools, which can be up to 4,000x more capital-efficient than a standard AMM
- Earn with every trade: Charge a sourcing fee to capture value from every purchase players make
- Incentivize liquidity provision: Encourage liquidity provision by offering token rewards using Orca’s built-in liquidity mining program
Ready to get building? Let’s hop right in.
Radically simple integration
You’ve heard this before: Some-SaaS-company promises that their integration will take just a few minutes. Several hours of mysterious errors, nonexistent docs, and ignored support requests later, the integration is no closer to the finish line.
Orca is known for human-centered design, and that same philosophy extends to developer experience. Words are cheap, so let’s take a tour of the evidence:
Fig. 1: Fetching data from the Orca SDK takes just a few lines of code.
Fig. 2: Orca’s Developer Portal offers detailed docs for every step of the integration.
Fig. 3: Expert Developer Advocates are available to debug the integration.
While the Discord channel pictured above is available to everyone, games that produce significant trading volume can expect white-glove service from Orca’s Developer Advocates in a dedicated group.
The cherry on top? Orca’s active community of contributors means game studios will get access to new features over time. Here are just a few potential extensions:
- More SDKs: Integrate Orca natively in Unity, C#, and C++ code
- On-chain oracle: Real-time pricing for game tokens powered by Orca’s concentrated liquidity AMM
- GameFi Dashboard: A user-friendly UI for minting tokens, creating pools, and monitoring the health of game economies
- Your idea: Can you think of something else that would kickstart your development? Share it by getting in touch here!
Orca recently launched a Builders Program, which awarded over $225,000 USD to 11 teams to build on top of Orca. Interested in receiving a grant to contribute to the Orca for Games ecosystem? Get in touch by dropping us a line at builders@orca.so!
Real-world examples
Congratulations: You’ve finished the tutorial! 😉Next, let’s dive into a few examples of real, in-development games that are powered by Orca.
Genopets: Instant trades, instant earnings
What if simply by walking to work, you could level up your Pikachu and earn money to boot? That’s the premise of Genopets, a move-to-earn NFT game reminiscent of Pokémon.
Genopets used Orca to enable trading of $GENE and $KI, the game’s two key tokens.
Orca’s concentrated liquidity smart contract ensures that players are able to buy and sell $GENE and $KI at competitive prices, and the Orca web UI makes the experience a cinch.
“Easily-accessible liquidity is the most important part in creating a web3 GameFi economy. Orca’s Whirlpools allowed us to quickly bootstrap the liquidity needed for our in-game token with optimized slippage,” said Genopets co-founder Albert Chen.
In the future, Genopets plans to build an in-game marketplace powered by the Orca SDK. “Eventually, we will move the token trading functionality inside our mobile app,” Chen continued. “Orca’s SDK is an important piece of that puzzle.”
Using the Orca SDK’s sourcing fee, games like Genopets can earn revenue with every purchase players make, creating an instant revenue stream. (Now that’s supporting the devs.)
Star Atlas: Engagement through liquidity mining
Does “territorial conquest, political domination, and living among the stars” sound like your idea of a good time? If so, you might take a peek at Star Atlas, an upcoming space exploration game powered by Solana.
The Star Atlas team has an ambitious vision of building a game on par with big-box studios. Players can already purchase and stake the game’s native currencies, $ATLAS and $POLIS. A liquidity mining campaign on Orca helped bootstrap liquidity for these tokens.
Michael Wagner, the CEO of ATMTA, Inc. (developers of Star Atlas), put it best:
“It was great that $ATLAS and $POLIS were on Orca because it allowed us to focus on what matters most: Building the best space exploration game you’ll ever play.”
StepN: A soaring start
If you’ve been plugged into crypto for the past year, you’re likely to have heard of StepN, the move-to-earn game that defined the genre.
Through an integration with Orca, StepN was able to quickly ship an in-game wallet in which players could buy and sell $GST and $GMT, the tokens used for core gameplay. This helped the app reach millions of daily active users within months of launch, turning StepN into a runaway success.
In June 2022, the StepN team launched their own proprietary DEX, DOOAR. Initially, DOOAR lacked an interface for users to deposit liquidity, causing a significant increase in price impact (read: worse prices and therefore a worse experience for players).
While StepN’s success is nothing short of admirable, the team is now faced with a difficult dual mandate: Building a game and building a DEX. As discussed earlier in this study, these two mandates have little synergy. Despite players’ complaints about delays in new feature releases, DOOAR remains on stage 1 of the team’s proposed roadmap.
Instead of building a custom DEX, existing games can take the following handy shortcut:
- Create concentrated liquidity pools on Orca using Community Listings
- Enable trading of game assets in the game’s marketplace using the Orca SDK
- Charge a sourcing fee on each trade
Just like that, you have both a fully-functioning marketplace and a revenue stream. Now that’s a running start!
How to get started
Ready to kickstart your development? Orca’s SDK and smart contract are both open-source, which means anyone can start building on the platform at any time. A few friendly reminders to the builder community:
- Detailed documentation is available in the Developer Portal.
- Friendly Developer Advocates are on standby in the #integrate-with-orca channel in the Orca Discord. Hit them with your toughest technical questions!
- Want to get in touch? Share some context about your game in this form.
Orca is proud to be the liquidity toolkit of choice for an increasing number of web3 games. Happy building! 🐳
Disclaimer: The content of this communication is not financial advice and should not be relied on by any persons or entities as financial advice. This communication has not been provided in consideration of any recipient’s financial needs. We have not conducted any financial assessment based on the personal circumstances of any recipients. Before using the Orca protocol, carefully review all relevant documentation and consider risks, including, without limitation, total loss of funds.
