Hi everyone, this is Orca’s ATLAS and POLIS pools being explained by Milan from Orca. I took the transcript from Youtube and tried to make it more readable.
DEV:
Let’s move to the to the next section. We have here Milan with us. Milan is from Orca. Milan how are you today? Hold on just let me let me thank you as well for making some time to join us today. Really excited about our relationship with you guys and yeah welcome in
Milan|Orca:
Hey guys thank you very much for having me. Can you all hear me? Awesome yeah thank you so much for having me. Very excited to kind of partner with Star Atlas. Love your project since the beginning. I have a bunch of the Rebirth posters and now have a whole bunch of cool ships, a pilot’s license, and pets so that’s been awesome. Yeah i’m from Orca I lead business development and integrations. So essentially help projects integrate with Orca, build on top of Orca, and then doing partnerships kind of like this with Star Atlas .
DEV:
Yeah so tell us a little bit about Orca. What is Orca?
Milan|Orca:
For sure so Orca is a general purpose DEX. It’s an AMM that works very similar to Uniswap. You can trade a bunch of different tokens on Solana, and we’re expanding that list pretty much daily, to more and more tokens. So you can swap swap through the UI you can provide liquidity for various token pairs and earn rewards. And those rewards are whether it’s trading fees on the platform Orca emissions and some new product which we’ve recently launched called double div pools which will also earn you partner projects tokens. And then if you’re a developer or builder you can also build on top of worker. So you can build arbitrage bots, you can build different trackers, or you can integrate swaps directly into your app and for that we have a typescript SDK which pretty much covers all the different actions you’d want to do on orca but programmatically.
DEV:
That’s great that’s great and thank you for the overview of what is Orca. And as you may imagine we have a lot of outlets and police holders here so i want to ask you the question. Like we announced the partnership some days ago, i don’t i think it was yesterday you can remember correctly, but how can the Star Atlas token holders benefit from this?
Milan|Orca:
Yeah for sure so essentially what we did yesterday was we launched Orca’s fall festival and that’s basically a two-week period where we increased Orca emissions across all different pools on Orca itself. And a part of that is adding more double dip pools.
And double dip pools are essentially pools that you can provide liquidity to and you’d earn Orca tokens as well as a partner project token. So i think the thing that’s most interesting for kind of everyone in this this chat and for ATLAS and POLIS holders is that we now have ATLAS/USDC and POLIS/USDC pools. So you can head to Orca and check out the website, check out try some swaps, i think you’ll really like it. I think all our users really talk about kind of the user friendliness and the slick UI and reliability of swapping on Orca so definitely try swapping
But I think the more important part for all the holders is pretty much to try providing some liquidity in either of those two pools. So you can provide liquidity to those pools and then you’d go to the double dip tab on our pools tab and stake those lp tokens and you’ll start earning Orca ATLAS and POLIS depending on which pool you enter.
DEV:
Hey Santi, let me let me jump in really quickly here just because you know these these types of protocols are not completely risk-free right Milan? So maybe if you don’t mind just at a very high level describing to people the way that automated market making works, what it actually means when you’re contributing to a pool you know to to earn that yield, and what maybe again just high level what some of the risks associated with participation in these protocols means.
Milan|Orca:
Yeah for sure. So automated market making it’s a concept that was essentially invented on the blockchain by Uniswap and it does it allows pretty much any user to participate as a market maker for a market. Whereas in traditional finance usually that’s pretty much gated to professional market makers and traders who run bots and different algorithms to provide liquidity to a market and they earn some fees on top of that some trading fees for themselves.
What an automated market maker essentially simplifies is allows anyone who holds the token to provide liquidity to the pool and they can start earning passive interest and fees and extra emissions on that those assets.
The primary risk with providing liquidity to any of these pools is that it’s called impermanent loss. Probably not the best name for it but essentially what it is is that in a pool on Orca or any other AMM we have token A and token B, so for example ATLAS and USDC, and if the price of one of those tokens increases significantly or decreases significantly versus the other one when you withdraw from that pool you’ll actually be more weighted towards the other side. And that’s kind of the primary risk that if there’s significant volatility then you will have more of the token that is actually worth less than it was when you deposit it
So ideally what you would do is usually try depositing when the periods of volatility are not super high and the token is not moving in one direction all the time and that way you earn the yields and and generally protect your initial capital
DEV:
That was an amazing description thank you for that. So just as an additional point of clarification when you’re contributing you’re contributing 50 of each of the total token values right so you know or or or rather it has to be proportional so you have to put the same dollar value in as the the dollar equivalent value of a quote currency or something like ATLAS OR POLIS right?
Milan|Orca:
Yep exactly. Yeah so what you’re doing is you’re contributing to both sides of the pool so both ATLAS and USDC in equivalent amounts if there was an ATLAS/SOL pool you would be depositing ATLAS and SOL in equivalent amounts in USDC value
DEV:
Great and so the the issue with directional markets or markets, you know that are either call it appreciating in value or depreciating in value, is that you are providing that liquidity which means you’re either buying those tokens if the market’s selling off or you’re selling your tokens as as the market is appreciating right?
Milan|Orca:
Yep exactly. So in a trending market especially kind of trending hard in one direction you’re generally gonna be holding more of the token over time that’s counter to the trend.
DEV:
And I completely agree with you I think the the concept of impermanent loss is really a misnomer. Because the reality is if it is a an upward trending market. For example you know what impermanent loss represents the value that you were able to capture through the market activity against the total maximum market value you would possess if you had held those tokens right? And so you know even even in an upward trending market you are actually selling tokens but you’re you’re technically selling them for less than you could have sold them for had you timed the market perfectly and tried to sell them at the top. That’s that’s the way I interpret would you would you suggest otherwise Milan
Milan|Orca:
Nope that’s exactly correct. Generally that’s kind of why, at least in the initial initial stages of an AMM, usually they provide some liquidity mining incentives to offset that loss especially if you’re in a trending market
DEV:
Yeah that’s great. I’m really excited about the the program that we put together with you I think what’s unique about Orca, and we love Raydium by the way we still have pools that are operating on Raydium they do have dual yield pools as well, but what’s really unique about Orca is that you guys do not require that there’s an Orca/ATLAS or Orca/POLIS pool to be able to earn that dual yield. People are actually able to use USDC and ATLAS or POLIS and still earn orca as well as earning ATLAS and POLIS that’s pretty cool.
Milan|Orca:
Yep. Yes I think there’s kind of two cool things about Orca. One is definitely the UX and the UI . Like if you use it I think generally I found it to be kind of the smoothest swap. And that’s pretty much our goal. To make it as simple as easy to swap as possible. But yeah on the other side essentially what we want to do is try making the experience for traders as simple as possible. And for us that means kind of having the pairs that they want played which is usually ATLAS/USDC or ATLAS/SOL. And that’s kind of why we made the decision to use USDC as the base pair just to make it as simple as possible for all users.
DEV:
Yeah so for everyone out there in in the audience right now who’s you know that might be wondering what they can actually utilize their ATLAS and POLIS for these are solid options. I mean the the yield right now on the Orca pools are I want to say between 190 and 220 percent APR. There’s a you know it is kind of important to understand the difference between APR which is a simple computation of interest over an annual basis versus what you can accomplish through compounding or APY.
But that’s pretty big. I mean if you’re looking for something to use your ATLAS and POLIS for these pools are a good option. Because it just earns you additional ATLAS, POLIS, and Orca tokens over time that you can then use for things like purchasing ships in the future or contributing to governance.
So I think it’s a great program. I’m really excited that we that we were able to launch this and i think the double dip pools especially through the Orca format is pretty rewarding to two people that are participating
Milan|Orca:
Same on our end. We’re super excited to have both ATLAS and POLIS on the platform and yeah currently the yields are pretty strong and actually the 100% to 200% is just for the ATLAS/POLIS side.
And you’ll also earn about 50% more in Orca tokens as well. And when you compound it and we’re working on different ways to make it easier for users to kind of compound whether that’s daily or weekly and you’ll kind of see those on the UI over the next few days.
DEV:
Yeah man when auto compounding.
Milan|Orca:
Soon we are working through it soon.
DEV:
Yeah common theme in crypto everybody wants everything right now and you know these are great features that that people are requesting. And looking forward to continuing the relationship with you guys. And so just to clarify as well we have this program running now for six months with you so the opportunity to be involved in these liquidity pools will exist with these specific incentives for at least six months and it’s quite likely that we figure something out going into the future as well.
Milan|Orca:
Yep exactly. Really looking forward to the next six months i think we’ll have some cool collaborations coming.
Q:
My question is I’m kind of new to staking in liquidity pools and and everything I’m just curious I am staked right now in one of the Raydium pools. And I’m just curious what what is the benefit of what would be the benefit of moving my staking from let’s say the Raydium/POLIS pool to like say one of the Orca pools? What would be the benefit why would I want to do that versus just leaving it in the Raydium pool?
Milan|Orca:
Hey thanks for the question. No definitely makes sense. Ii think there’s pretty much two benefits to this. One is that on Raydium in order to earn dual rewards Ray and ATLAS tokens you have to deposit into the Ray/ATLAS pool. So you have to be holding both Ray and ATLAS. Whereas on Orca it’s an ATLAS/USDC and a POLIS/USDC pair. So you’ll still earn Orca tokens as a dual reward but you don’t necessarily have to actually hold Orca tokens in order to earn those rewards. So i think that’s one of the major benefits. I think the second one is we’re doing a fall festival right now so we’ve pretty much doubled emissions across the board for the next two weeks. And this started yesterday so it’ll run until October 7th. Sso i’m not sure exactly what the rates on Raydium are but Orca at least are compared to our usual rewards every week they are double for for this temporary period.
Q:
awesome thanks so much guys appreciate it.
Milan|Orca:
thanks for the question.
Q:
Hey thanks a lot for having me and thank you so much this is a great project we are all looking forward to. Nnow for the Orca staking with Raydium unfortunately as you know there are a lot of restrictions for the US users and players so is Orca open to US investors?
Milan|Orca:
Yes orca is open to the US.
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