Thank you for your constructive request for a progress update on prior governance decisions. As Orca matures, we recognize that professional financial standards—including clear reporting and execution guardrails—are critical for maintaining long-term trust and commitment from ORCA tokenholders and stakers.
Orca’s primary objective is the disciplined allocation of capital to maximize protocol value. Below is our formal response to the points raised.
1) Treasury Buybacks: Strategy & Execution Policy
The Council understands the concern regarding the apparent “pause” in treasury-led buybacks. To be clear, the Council has prioritized yield-generation and programmatic stability over discretionary market purchases during periods of high volatility.
A. Current Status & Strategy
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The 24-Month Window: This program formally began in July 2025 following governance approval. While execution was not mandated to start on Day 1, this timeframe serves as our window for opportunistic deployment.
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Validator Staking: Rather than immediate market buys, we elected to stake all treasury SOL to the Orca Validator. This strategy generates a consistent staking yield and block rewards for the treasury, effectively increasing the “dry powder” available for future ORCA repurchases.
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Programmatic Priority: Approximately 1.33M ORCA has been programmatically purchased and deposited to the xORCA liquid staking contract for the benefit of participating ORCA tokenholders. The Council hears the request from the community for increased buybacks and believes this systematic, script-based approach is more appropriate in current market conditions than sporadic discretionary buys from treasury given other factors discussed herein. Accordingly, the Council has recently increased the percentage of protocol fee revenue utilized to programmatically purchase ORCA to be deposited as rewards for xORCA stakers from 20% to 40%.
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Competing Treasury Bids: Orca’s initial development team has opportunistically executed open-market purchases of 1.8M ORCA to fund incentive-aligned grants for contributors and new hires (subject to at least a four-year lock-up and one-year eligibility period), and has approximately $7.2M remaining that are earmarked for buybacks.
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Research & Development Investment: The Council recently invested 500K USDC of the treasury in an R&D exercise of a new confidential product experiment of the initial development team. The principle of the grant and yield generated from the testing exercise will be returned to the treasury at the expiration of the two-month testing period which began on January 1, 2026.
B. Execution Policy & Guardrails
To remove the “black box” element, all future opportunistic buybacks (utilizing USDC and validator yield) will follow these institutional-grade constraints:
| Parameter | Policy |
|---|---|
| Execution Method | Managed via a professional Market Maker for optimal execution. |
| Strategy | Opportunistic buys based on market conditions for the treasury. |
| Slippage Control | Hard cap at 1%, with a preference for 0.75% to minimize value leakage. |
| Volume Constraint | Daily purchases will not exceed 10% of the 24-hour trading volume. |
Commitment: the Council will publish the specific wallet addresses and a public reporting format to ensure on-chain verifiability after initializing opportunistic buybacks for the treasury.
2) “50% Development” Spend: Operational Transparency
As protocol fees are generated, they flow to the Foundation which allocated 50% to the ORCA tokenholder treasury (of which 40% now flows to xORCA buybacks and 10% to the treasury) and 50% to the initial development team to fund its operations. While Orca operates in a competitive landscape, we are committed to provide additional transparency with how this capital is spent.
A. Current Operational Scale
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Human Capital: the initial development team currently has about 42 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs), and
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Run Rate: its aggregate operating expenses are approximately $11M per year.
B. Forthcoming Reporting
The Council has requested that the development team provide a Quarterly Performance & Financial Report to the ORCA tokenholder governance community by mid Q1 2026, which will provide additional transparency and will include the following:
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Financial Reporting: A summary of aggregate inflows from protocol fees and a refined breakdown of both revenue and operating expenses, including high level categories of major cost centers.
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Performance & Roadmap: An analysis of performance over the prior period, highlights of key product releases and achievements of other business objectives, as well a description of the roadmap ahead. In the meantime, here is a recap of recent product releases.
3) Strategic Leadership: Advocacy & “Project Open”
The Orca community prides itself on not merely being a passive participant in the Solana ecosystem; we are active architects of its strategic and regulatory future. Orca has long believed that sustainable protocol value is inextricably linked to a clear policy environment that supports innovation. To that end, Orca’s development team has taken a leading role in global policy advocacy, including in the United States, the United Kingdom and Korea.
Key highlights from recent policy engagement by Orca’s initial development team include:
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Partnering with the Solana Policy Institute in Project Open, a high-stakes advocacy initiative seeking to compliantly bring U.S. public equities onto Solana DeFi.
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Holding in-person briefings on U.S. crypto policy with the White House, the SEC, and dozens of Senate and Congressional Offices, with the objective to progress the conversation from abstract skepticism of decentralized finance (DeFi) to a concrete understanding of Orca’s peer-to-protocol technology and its groundbreaking potential with a wide array of assets, including public equities. They also met with lawmakers in the United Kingdom, Korea, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. By educating lawmakers on the mechanics of automated market makers (AMMs) and decentralized governance, Orca’s community is helping to shape the blueprint for responsible, pro-innovation policy.
As a result of these efforts, the Orca community is helping define how DeFi can remain true to its core values—permissionlessness, transparency, and user ownership—while continuing to thrive through a period of global regulatory evolution. This ensures that Orca, and the broader Solana ecosystem, remains resilient without compromising what makes DeFi unique and powerful.