Users are able to use the Orca protocol to transact with digital assets on a peer-to-peer or peer-to-protocol basis by trading against liquidity  pools, which are created and seeded by other users providing liquidity of a pair of tokens into such liquidity pools in exchange for a stake of the liquidity and trading fees generated by such pools.

Orca is a non-custodial automated market maker (AMM) protocol built on Solana. Orca was founded by Yutaro Mori and Grace Kwan and launched in 2021.

ORCA tokenholders govern the Orca protocol treasury, which receives a portion of the trading fees paid by users of the protocol.

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Orca

Orca | Data Breakdown

# Orca Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Expenses measures the total cost incurred by Orca to operate its business. For Orca, this metric is represented by the value of native ORCA asset incentives distributed to liquidity providers. These incentives are allocated to pools within the Whirlpools product to bootstrap liquidity. The total cost is calculated by tracking reward emission rates on-chain and converting the distributed asset amounts to USD.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `InitializeReward`, `InitializeRewardV2`, `SetRewardEmissions`, and `SetRewardEmissionsV2` instructions from `Whirlpool` programs, covering Solana
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for the ORCA asset

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Reward vault identification

- **Purpose**: Identification of reward vaults associated with the native ORCA asset.
- **Logic**: `InitializeReward` and `InitializeRewardV2` instructions from `Whirlpool` programs are parsed. Reward vaults are filtered to isolate those where the reward mint matches the native ORCA asset account (`orcaEKTdK7LKz57vaAYr9QeNsVEPfiu6QeMU1kektZE`). A distinct list of these ORCA-specific reward vaults is maintained.
- **Key fields**: `rewardVault`, `rewardMint`

### Component B: Emission rate tracking

- **Purpose**: Tracking of the rate of ORCA emissions per second for each whirlpool.
- **Logic**: `SetRewardEmissions` and `SetRewardEmissionsV2` instructions from `Whirlpool` programs are parsed. These instructions are filtered to include only those associated with the identified ORCA reward vaults. The emission rate is extracted and normalized by dividing the raw value by 2 raised to the power of 64 to account for the X64 fixed-point representation. The active time interval for each emission rate is determined by ordering the instructions chronologically and calculating the duration between consecutive updates.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `rewardVault`, `rewardIndex`, `whirlpool`, `emissionsPerSecondX64`

### Component C: Daily incentive calculation

- **Purpose**: Calculation of the daily volume of ORCA assets distributed as incentives.
- **Logic**: A daily timestamp spine is generated to define day boundaries. For each day, the active duration of each emission rate is calculated in seconds. The daily emission amount is computed by multiplying the active seconds by the corresponding emission rate. These daily amounts are aggregated by whirlpool and normalized by the asset's decimal precision.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `amount`, `token_incentives`

### Component D: USD conversion and aggregation

- **Purpose**: Conversion of daily asset incentives to USD and aggregation as expenses.
- **Logic**: The daily ORCA asset incentive amounts are multiplied by the end-of-day price of the ORCA asset. The resulting USD values are classified as expenses for the Whirlpools product. Missing days are filled with zeros to ensure a continuous daily time series.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `expenses`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

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Expenses

Expenses

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