Orca DEX daily fees drop to $81,000 as weekend trading thins

The quick take

Price: Orca DEX ($ORCA) trades at $1.36, down 0.7% in 24 hours as of 2:41 p.m. ET.
Trigger: Swap volume on Orca fell 68% to $77.4 million in DefiLlama’s latest 24-hour reading.
Watch: Whether weekday trading lifts volume back toward the weekly average of about $205 million a day.

Trading on Orca DEX ($ORCA), a Solana ($SOL) exchange, slowed sharply on Sunday. Orca DEX daily fees fell to about $81,000, down 60% from a day earlier, according to DefiLlama. Orca’s own data shows almost the same number.

What happened

DefiLlama recorded $77.4 million in swap volume on Orca in its latest 24-hour reading, taken at 2:47 p.m. ET. The reading before it showed $238.9 million. That is a drop of 68% from one window to the next.

Orca’s own data, read at 2:45 p.m. ET over a rolling 24 hours, showed $89.2 million in volume. The two windows are not the same, so the totals differ. Both point to a much quieter day.

Fees followed volume down. DefiLlama counted $80,965 in fees, against $203,442 in the reading before. Orca reported $80,871 in fees for its own 24-hour window, a gap of less than 0.2%.

Traders pay these fees on every swap. Orca’s figures show the protocol’s own revenue was $10,513, about 13% of the fees. Across all pools, fees came to about 0.09% of the volume Orca reported.

Why it moved

The cause of the slowdown is not confirmed. The drop came on a weekend. The wider market was also calm: $SOL traded at $89.53 on Binance’s SOL/USDT pair, down 0.1% in 24 hours.

The whole Solana market was quiet too. DefiLlama put total Solana DEX volume at $917.4 million over 24 hours. Orca’s $77.4 million was about 8.4% of that, sixth among Solana exchanges.

PumpSwap led the list with $217.3 million. Raydium AMM sat just ahead of Orca at $78.5 million, so the two were close to even on the day.

Over a full week, the picture looks less sharp. DefiLlama shows $1.44 billion of Orca volume over seven days, an average of about $205 million a day. Sunday’s reading is well below that pace.

Who’s buying and selling

Most of Orca’s trading still runs through one core pair. Orca reported $26.0 million in 24-hour volume for its $SOL-$USDC pool, about 29% of its total. Next came a pool pairing $SOL with $WBTC at $5.1 million, then $ZEC with $USDC at $4.6 million.

Liquidity held up better than trading. DefiLlama put Orca’s total value locked at $283.0 million at 10:52 a.m. ET, close to the $289.0 million it showed at the start of Nov. 2 UTC. Orca’s own figure was lower, at $265.2 million.

On the token side, buyers and sellers were close to even. DexScreener counted 719 buys and 738 sells in the top $ORCA pool over 24 hours. GeckoTerminal, tracking a different $ORCA-$SOL pool, showed 75 buys and 66 sells.

$ORCA traded at $1.36 on Binance’s ORCA/USDT pair, down 0.7% in 24 hours. Jupiter’s price for the token agreed within 0.2%. The token barely moved while the exchange’s fees fell.

What to watch next

The first test is Monday. Orca’s fees move with its swap volume, so a return toward the weekly average would show up in fees as well. A second quiet day would point to more than a weekend lull.

The second is liquidity. Orca’s total value locked has stayed near $283 million through the week. A steady pool base gives traders deep markets even on slow days.

The third is the race with Raydium. The two exchanges were less than $1.1 million apart in DefiLlama’s latest 24-hour reading.

Bottom line: Orca’s fees fell with a quiet weekend of trading, while the liquidity in its pools stayed close to last week’s level.