Orca DEX Announces Major Buyback Program & Staking Rewards—Bullish Move for DeFi Investors
Orca DEX just dropped a bombshell—its treasury is going on a token buyback spree while rolling out staking rewards. Talk about doubling down on value capture.
Buybacks meet DeFi
The Solana-based DEX isn’t just sitting on its liquidity. Aggressive buybacks signal confidence (or maybe just clever tokenomics theater—this is crypto, after all).
Staking goes live
Lock-and-earn mechanics aim to curb sell pressure. Because nothing says 'long-term alignment' like tying up your assets for imaginary internet points.
DeFi’s latest playbook: When in doubt, buy back your own token and hope traders don’t notice the circularity. Genius or desperation? Either way, ORCA holders win—for now.
On a YTD basis, Orca has generated about $115 million in fees.
50% of these fees go toward protocol development, while 30% are directed to the treasury wallet that fuels ORCA buybacks should the aforementioned governance proposal pass.
The remaining 20% of fees are allocated to a separate ongoing ORCA buyback initiative that will eventually go toward ORCA staking.
The Orca team told me that staking is slated for launch in September, so that’s two potential value accrual streams for ORCA token holders in the NEAR term.
On a market cap-to-revenue basis, ORCA trades about 24% lower (7.36x) than RAY (9.63x), which may suggest some relative upside for ORCA if revenues are consistent.
But that’s a big if when you take into account the rise of prop AMMs on solana that points to an increasingly hyper-competitive and commoditized DEX landscape.
Orca isn’t resting on its laurels, though. The team also launched Wavebreak in beta two weeks ago, a memecoin launchpad built on Orca’s own proprietary in-house tech stack.
Compared to your average launchpad, Orca’s Wavebreak is designed to be “human-first,” meaning tokens in the bonding phase are designed to be protected from sniper bots.
Outside of Solana, Orca is also the dominant DEX on the SVM-based ethereum L2 chain, Eclipse. Orca’s Eclipse deployment has far lower usage than Solana, though — about 93 million in July volumes vs. 20 billion on Solana.
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