Media Foundation Interview With Grace Kwan: What’s Next for Orca

Nowadays, one of the most prominent players within Solana’s ecosystem is Orca. This automated market maker (AMM) boasts more than USD 30 billion in lifetime trading volume, and in the past few months, Orca’s metrics have ranged as high as USD 460 million in daily trading volume and 160,000 users per week.

Orca describes itself as a “human-centered” AMM protocol. This distinctive condition also applies to Media Network, a trustless protocol that harnesses the power of the MEDIA token, granting users the freedom to buy and sell web services without restrictions.

And I strongly emphasize this point because co-founder Grace Kwan, known in the crypto community as @oritheorca or Ori, realized that the key to taking the protocol to a whole new level lies first and foremost in the users and their interactions with the interface.

Before Orca, Ori had never designed a product entirely on her own, without a design team. When allowed to design Orca’s UX entirely from scratch, she found it an exhilarating challenge: “I applied the same human-centered design process that I learned at IDEO and Button and quickly observed several UX pain points with existing AMMs, such as the tedium of price comparison and the high number of clicks needed to make a single trade. I applied these observations by designing the Fair Price Indicator, which auto-compares the quote for trade with CoinGecko, and the Magic Bar, which allows users to type their trades. Though these features weren’t that difficult to implement, our early users loved them, establishing Orca’s user-friendly reputation,” says Ori about the journey’s starting point.

Besides, she points out that Orca gets “a lot of appreciation from builders” as they reach out to say how practical and easy-to-use Orca’s tools are compared with other protocols. “These people use Orca for trading and market making through our open-source SDK. The credit for that goes entirely to the tireless contributors who go above and beyond to ensure that the developer experience is as smooth as the trading experience on the UI,” she comments.

Nevertheless, Ori had to overcome numerous challenges in her career. Ultimately, these brought new features and scaled the Orca platform’s usability: “One challenge Orca has faced is ensuring that the tokens that users want to trade are always available. On most protocols, listing a token is a tedious process involving many manual steps. That makes us excited to lift the curtain on Community Listings, which will allow anyone to create a Whirlpool for any two fungible tokens on Orca via a simple web interface and directly propose listing any fungible SPL token.”

“What’s more, pool creators will be able to set the trading fees charged for that pool, empowering liquidity providers to optimize the capital-efficiency of their liquidity based on market conditions. The upshot of this is a richer portfolio of available tokens and the ability to trade them at the most competitive price,” explains Ori.

Long-term goals from a Co-Founder’s perspective

In the interview, Ori revealed that the primary long-term goal of Orca is to create a more stable, efficient, and accessible global financial system. At this time, she believes Solana is the most suitable blockchain to underpin this transformation.

In addition, the co-founder also explains that liquid markets are a necessary building block for the financial tools that comprise that system.

Is Web3 the future?

“Web3 can be a game-changer for openness and equality, but not everything needs to be Web3,” comments Ori. She also explains that just because number three is higher than number two doesn’t mean that the experience of Web3 products is better than Web2's.

“On the contrary, the fact that many Web3 products don’t track information about their users means they cannot personalize their services to the same degree. In most cases, this lack of personalization translates to a worse user experience. Users may be willing to make that tradeoff for products with a strong desire for privacy, such as financial tools. For the rest? The jury’s still out,” she says.

Within this framework, Ori agrees that infrastructure protocols, just like Media Network dCDN, are essential in this new age of internet technology, an age that focuses on decentralized control. “For Web3 to scale, the same thing needs to be true. For instance, Media Network Legacy dCDN can help ensure that there are enough ‘always-on’ communication channels for networks like the Solana validator network,” concludes Ori.