Orca: The DEX for people, not programs

You may not have heard of Orca, that's okay, it's new, and it is on the strangely neglected (but pumping) Solana blockchain.

I've been buying both $SOL and $ORCA recently, and was lucky to get in just before the recent FOMO driven pump. Solana is justifiably pumping because Solana is special. Solana is delivering now, features other blockchains are only promising, such as lightening quick transactions times: 50,000 transactions per second on a chain with a block time of only 400ms! However, the main benefit of Solana, an advantage to DEXs built on it, has to be the transaction fees: the fees, currently around $0.00037 are game changingly tiny.

Orca has set out to deliver an DEX for people, ordinary people that can't afford the gas fees we see on other chains. Their GUI is simple and clean, so much so that it would be easy to overlook the great features. 

In no particular order here are some features I love.

• Fair Price Indicator - when you attempt to use the AMM to swap a token, Orca will let you know if the price you are paying is fair. It achieves this by comparing the price the AMM is offering you against the quoted price on CoinGecko and simultaneously checking the price impact of your trade. Providing both these checks return an answer within a 1% tolerance the AMM will display a nice green tick and the words "Fair price". If either conditions are not met the AMM will warn you and let you know what was out and by how much. This feature could save you from a costly mistake.
  
  
• Adjustable and transparent projected earnings - when investing in a liquidity pool, you can chose the time period you want to use as the basis for calculating the projected earnings. For example you can use the average from the last 30 days or just the last 24hrs if you so wish. 
  
  
• Aquafarms - I love this feature, the Aquafarms are a selected range of liquidity pools where in addition to earning fees you also receive a pay-out in $ORCA, in effect they are auto-farming liquidity pools. Normally when investing in staking or farming I have to execute complicated calculations to determine the most efficient compounding interval. With Solana fees being so low, these calculations are largely redundant, because there is no material penalty to high frequency compounding. The ORCA/USDC pool is currently paying 0.87 $ORCA per day / $1000 invested - if these $ORCA are harvested and ploughed straight back into the pool, a return far in excess of the quoted 155% APY pool returns should be achievable.
  
  
• Wallet display - this is so simple, yet other DEXs do not have it. To the left of the screen is a nice big panel displaying my current wallet balances for each token that is listed on Orca. No need to open up my Sollet extension each time I want to check a balance.
  
  

The team behind Orca are hyper responsive, going beyond what most other teams offer. On Telegram, one punter who was asking lots of questions, was even offered the opportunity to schedule an appointment for an informal chat with Orca's Business Development lead.

$ORCA was also launched in a community focussed fashion, rather than a typical IDO $ORCA was simply airdropped to early adopters of the platform such as liquidity providers.

Orca is also promising further features and upgrades including an Ethereum bridge and language options for its GUI.

I am very impressed with Orca, and personally view this as a great opportunity to get in early, on a project, that I think has the potential to deliver real returns for its investors and significant growth. Orca is going to be an absolute killer DEX.