Orca Review

Orca is rated in our decentralized exchange ranking, which scores nine protocols on five equally weighted criteria. This entry covers the Whirlpools concentrated-liquidity program on Solana as documented on 1 November 2026. The basis is desk research of Orca's own documentation, its public API, its GitHub licence file and Solana Explorer; we did not trade or provide liquidity.

How Orca scores in decentralized exchanges

Every criterion carries the same weight, so the overall score is the plain average: (9 + 2 + 7 + 4 + 9) ÷ 5 = 31 ÷ 5 = 6.2 out of 10.

This is a re-score. The previous entry, checked on 24 July 2026, stood at 4.6. Audit disclosure rose from 3 to 9 because Orca's security page now lists dated reports by named firms. Immutability & governance rose from 4 to 7 because the governance FAQ now states who can upgrade the program. Fee transparency moved from 10 to 9 because two official Orca pages give different rates for the same tier. Licence and chain coverage are unchanged.

Strongest criteria: fees and audits

Fee transparency (9)

Each Whirlpool takes its fee from a fixed tier, and Orca lists the tiers by tick spacing (the price-step size of a pool). It also states what happens to the fee: 87% to liquidity providers, 12% to the protocol treasury and 1% to the Orca Climate Fund. The trading-fees page goes one level further and divides the treasury share into 50% to the initial development team, 10% to the DAO fee treasury and 40% to ORCA buybacks for xORCA. Orca's public API matched these figures on 1 November 2026: every SOL/USDC pool we pulled returned a 13% protocol fee rate (12% treasury plus 1% climate fund), with the swap fee matching its tier. On a $1,000 swap in a 0.30% pool, $3.00 is charged: $2.61 to LPs, $0.36 to the treasury and $0.03 to the climate fund.

The mark is not a 10 because the trading-fees page lists the tick-spacing-8 tier at 0.08%. The developer parameters page and the live pools both show 0.05%. A trader who looks up the fee on the user-facing page gets a wrong number for that tier. Adaptive Fee pools also use a tier as a base rate and can charge more during volatility, so the tier is a floor there, not a fixed price.

Audit disclosure (9)

Orca's security-audits page lists Whirlpools reviews by Kudelski (January 2022), Neodyme (May 2022), OtterSec (August 2024) and eight Sec3 reports from February 2025 to 30 September 2026, plus a Sec3 review of the Wavebreak launchpad program in July 2025. Each entry is dated and links to the report. Most entries describe their scope only as "Whirlpools program," which limits what a reader can match to a given code version. That is the reason for 9 rather than 10. An Immunefi bug bounty runs alongside. An audit is not insurance, and Orca's statement that it has had no protocol-level exploit is the company's own claim.

Weakest criteria: licence and chain coverage

Licence & code openness (2): a deficiency

The Whirlpools repository was licensed under Apache 2.0 until 26 February 2025. From 27 February 2025 it carries the Orca License from Orca Management Company S.A., under Cayman Islands law. The grant is revocable. It covers only listed uses such as education, research, personal use and testing, and any use that could benefit a competitor, including other DEXs and AMMs, needs written consent. You can read the code, but you have almost no right to reuse it. Our rubric scores that low by design. Orca's docs still describe the contracts as open source, which the licence file does not support.

Chain coverage (4): a narrow scope, measured

Orca runs on Solana. The Eclipse deployment it once listed has been withdrawal-only since 6 March 2026, so it adds nothing to coverage. Four is the mark this category gives other single-chain protocols. It measures reach, not quality.

Immutability & governance (7): disclosed, not removed

Orca's governance FAQ states that the Whirlpools program and the xORCA staking contract can be upgraded only by a 3-of-5 multisig. The rubric rewards a plain statement of who can change the contracts, and Orca now makes one. It is held below the top marks because the program remains upgradeable and the FAQ does not name the five signers. On Solana Explorer, the upgrade authority is the same address Orca's treasury page lists as the Community ORCA Treasury. That address also still holds the ORCA mint authority, so the token's 75 million supply cap rests on that address, not on a closed mint.

What the score does not cover

The rating does not measure liquidity depth, price execution, slippage, interface quality, the Vaults or Wavebreak products, or ORCA as an investment. It does not test whether a given pool is safe to trade. Pool creation is permissionless, so check token mint addresses yourself. It also does not assess regional access: Orca blocks its interface in 25 listed countries plus Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, and screens wallets. Our guide to comparing DEXs on what actually matters covers the factors outside this rubric.

Orca vs Raydium and Jupiter

The two other Solana protocols in the ranking are the closest comparison. Their marks below are as recorded on 1 November 2026.

Raydium matches or beats Orca on every criterion. The licence gap, 9 against 2, accounts for most of the two-point difference. Orca's lead over Jupiter comes from its stated upgrade arrangement (7 against 4), while Jupiter marks higher on audits (10 against 9). Across the full ranking, 1inch and Uniswap (both 8.4), PancakeSwap and Raydium (both 8.2) and Curve (7.0) sit above Orca.

Who this rating suits

The score suits a Solana user who wants to know the fee before a swap or a liquidity position, and who values named, dated audits and a stated upgrade process. It is less useful to a developer who wants to fork or build on the code: the licence forbids most of that. It is also less useful to anyone who needs a DEX on a chain other than Solana. If you are new to concentrated liquidity, read how automated market makers work before choosing a fee tier or price range. A high mark here is a statement about disclosure, not a recommendation to trade.