Orca DEX

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

Orca is a concentrated-liquidity AMM on Solana: LPs supply liquidity within chosen price ranges and earn trading fees while the market stays inside them. It held about $257M across roughly 700 pools at the 2026-08-14 survey. A Whirlpool position owns liquidity between chosen ticks; outside that band it stops earning fees and becomes single-sided. Orca’s vault authority design and published audit are relevant protocol controls, but they cannot remove the inventory payoff. This is an amm-lp class disposition, not an individual security rejection of Orca.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• Ships a product line without impermanent-loss exposure that merits its own review

The research file

The mechanism

Orca Whirlpools are concentrated-liquidity pools between token A and token B. Each position allocates liquidity across a selected tick range and earns its share of fees only when active. As swaps move price through the range, the position exchanges one asset for the other. A narrow range raises capital efficiency and sensitivity to the same relative-price move.

Control and operating record

The Whirlpool program controls token vault withdrawals; Orca documentation says neither the program owner nor configuration owner can withdraw vault assets. Configuration accounts govern fee tiers and some token-extension authorities, while pool creation is permissionless. Orca publishes the program source and a security audit. Those facts do not vet token issuers, each pool or any third-party position manager.

The exit

The position owner decreases liquidity and collects its current token balances, fees and rewards. Exit does not restore the original deposit ratio. Once price is outside the selected range, the position is economically one-sided; swapping back incurs market impact, and an impaired or frozen token can make the returned balance unusable.

Why the class rule decides

The amm-lp rule excludes deliberate two-sided inventory exposure regardless of custody controls or code maturity. Orca’s concentrated design makes range selection another active risk decision rather than curing impermanent loss. Review reopens for a distinct Orca product whose principal and return do not depend on AMM inventory.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• Orca Docs — Whirlpool account and vault architecture · primary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: Whirlpool account, vault architecture
• Orca Whirlpools — open-source SDK and program reference · secondary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: open-source SDK, program reference
• Orca Whirlpools security audit · secondary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: Orca Whirlpools security audit

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.