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 Token incentives Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Orca token incentives metric measures the daily USD value of ORCA tokens distributed as liquidity mining rewards through the Whirlpool protocol on Solana. This metric captures the total amount of ORCA tokens emitted to incentivize liquidity provision across all Whirlpool pools, providing insight into the protocol's investment in attracting and retaining liquidity providers.

The calculation involves identifying ORCA token reward vaults, tracking emissions rate changes over time, computing daily emissions based on time-weighted rates, and converting the final amounts to USD.

## 2. Data sources

- **Solana instruction logs**: Parsed Orca Whirlpool protocol instruction data including `InitializeReward`, `InitializeRewardV2`, `SetRewardEmissions`, and `SetRewardEmissionsV2` instructions
- **Token metadata**: ORCA token contract information and decimal precision data
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Daily closing prices for ORCA token in USD
- **Blockchain timestamps**: Block timestamp data for temporal calculations and daily aggregation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Reward vault identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies which reward vaults distribute ORCA tokens across the Whirlpool protocol
- **Logic**: Filters `InitializeReward` and `InitializeRewardV2` instruction logs to find vaults where the `rewardMint` field equals the ORCA token address ('orcaEKTdK7LKz57vaAYr9QeNsVEPfiu6QeMU1kektZE'). Extracts the `rewardVault` addresses and creates a distinct list of ORCA token reward vaults
- **Key fields**: `rewardVault` (vault address), `rewardMint` (token being distributed)

### Component B: Emissions rate tracking
- **Purpose**: Captures emissions rate changes over time for ORCA token rewards
- **Logic**: Processes `SetRewardEmissions` and `SetRewardEmissionsV2` instruction logs, filtering for the ORCA reward vaults identified in Component A. Converts the `emissionsPerSecondX64` fixed-point values to decimal format by dividing by 2^64. Creates time ranges for each emissions rate by using the timestamp of the next rate change as the end boundary, with the current timestamp as the end for the latest rate
- **Key fields**: `blockTimestamp` (when rate was set), `rewardVault`, `rewardIndex`, `whirlpool`, `emissionsPerSecond` (converted rate)

### Component C: Daily emissions calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates the actual ORCA tokens emitted each day based on time-weighted emissions rates
- **Logic**: Generates a daily timestamp spine covering the full emissions period from the earliest rate change to the latest. For each day, identifies overlapping emissions periods and calculates the intersection time between the day boundaries and each emissions period. Multiplies the overlap duration in seconds by the corresponding emissions rate to get the tokens emitted during that period. Sums all emissions for each day across all vaults, reward indices, and whirlpools
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily boundary), `amount` (calculated emissions in seconds × rate)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sums daily emissions amounts across all reward vaults, reward indices, and whirlpool pools for each day
- **Currency conversion**: Converts daily token amounts from micro-units to whole tokens by dividing by 1e6, then applies USD conversion using end-of-day ORCA token prices and handles decimal precision corrections
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries with timestamp grain set to 'day'
- **Final calculation**: The final metric represents the total USD value of ORCA tokens distributed as liquidity mining incentives per day across the entire Whirlpool protocol, with zero-fill strategy applied for days with no emissions

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

Value of native tokens distributed as incentives.

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Token incentives

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