Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/orca/inflation by MrNasDog.

Orca, the Solana exchange behind the ORCA token, issues nothing at all: the ORCA mint on Solana held 74,999,541 coins at both ends of the 90 days to Aug 22 2026, sitting 458 coins below the ceiling left by the community burn of Apr 16 2025. Against that flat supply, the protocol’s own trading fees bought 396,030 ORCA on the open market across 2,128 purchases. On a circulating base of 60.8M ORCA the Pressure Framework reads −0.65% net against our supply monitor’s +0.01% — a gap of 0.66 percentage points that is caused by the buyback’s destination, not by an error. ORCA is a fixed-supply token whose only live mechanism is a revenue-funded buyback-and-hold.

The verdict, in one paragraph

For the 90-day window ending Aug 22 2026, the MrNasDog Pressure Framework reads ORCA at −0.65% net: sell pressure of zero against buy pressure of 396,030 ORCA of programmatic buyback, on a circulating base of 60.8M ORCA. Our supply monitor reads +0.01% for the same window, a gap of 0.66 percentage points, which is over the half-point tolerance and so a monitor-gap flag ships with this build. The gap has a single, checkable cause. Bought-back ORCA is not burned — it is deposited into the staking vault at Ce5j11WAsSzM3nkzrw4Kw6v6ic3nbyqpv5eywjYKeKc5 — and the subtraction that settles the classification is exact: total supply of 74,999,541.855 minus circulating supply of 60,798,773.518 equals 14,200,768.337, which is the balance of the community treasury account at 5ooCx5vKiV2ZxAEKNNHAJjAJ7BARfLUZPGvgiApZjgFD to the sixth decimal. The treasury is the only bucket held outside the counted float, so the staking vault sits inside it and a supply count cannot see the buyback at all. ORCA is best labelled deflationary by revenue, not by protocol code.

Sell pressure: where new ORCA comes from

It does not come from anywhere, and that is the whole of the sell side. Sell #1, protocol inflation, is zero because Orca has no emission schedule, no staking rewards paid in new ORCA and no block subsidy — ORCA is a governance and fee-sharing token, not a chain’s security budget. The proof used here is a ceiling rather than an assumption: the Orca DAO burn of Apr 16 2025 took the treasury account from 39,914,207 to 14,914,207, a removal of exactly 25,000,000 ORCA, which set total supply to exactly 75,000,000. Today the ORCA mint at orcaEKTdK7LKz57vaAYr9QeNsVEPfiu6QeMU1kektZE reads 74,999,541.742, which is 458 coins below that ceiling. Burning only subtracts, so supply cannot have risen above the ceiling and returned to it — nothing has been minted since. One caveat belongs on the record and is why this row can never be marked permanent: the ORCA mint still has a live mint authority, and that authority was never destroyed — it sits behind a team multisig. Every one of the 35 transactions that authority signed during the window was read, and all of them are multisig housekeeping with no minting in sight. Minting is unused, not impossible, and unused is not the same thing.

The other sell rows are zero for concrete reasons. Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero: team and investor vesting completed in 2024, and rather than take a tracker’s word for it, the framework checks the arithmetic — every ORCA outside the counted float is already explained by the single treasury account, leaving no balance for any vesting escrow to hold. Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is zero — no public evidence of release in window. That treasury account has moved exactly 12 times in its entire existence, and the last movement was Mar 17 2026, when two grant transfers took out 641,654 ORCA. Releases are sporadic with no published calendar, so no run-rate is projected. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero: Orca has no estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution. Sell #5, staking vault withdrawals, is carried at zero and explained below.

Buy pressure: where new ORCA goes

Buy #1, the programmatic buyback, is the entire buy side at 396,030 ORCA. Orca keeps a 12% protocol share of every trading fee and spends 40% of that share buying ORCA on the open market, which works out to roughly 4.8% of all trading fees. That figure is measured, not quoted: the staking vault received 2,128 separate buyback deposits between May 24 2026 and Aug 21 2026, about one an hour, and the cross-check from the other direction agrees — Orca generated roughly $9.46M of trading fees over the same window, of which 4.8% is about $454,000, or about 366,000 ORCA at the current price. The two independent angles land 8% apart. The 40% rate is itself worth naming because widely-repeated summaries still quote 20%: the Orca council doubled the buyback share on Jan 13 2026, before this window opened, so the whole window ran at the higher rate and the trailing figure is a fair forward predictor.

The remaining buy rows are zero, and Buy #4 is the one that matters most. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero because nothing burns today — the buyback holds what it buys, and the only ORCA ever destroyed was the one-off 25,000,000 of Apr 2025 plus 458 coins of dust since. Buy #3, Foundation buy, is zero because the DAO programme that stakes roughly 55,000 SOL to fund open-market purchases delivers into the same vault Buy #1 already measures; booking it separately would double-count. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero despite the vault taking in 2,141,290 ORCA from stakers over the window, and the reason is deliberate. Staking ORCA returns xORCA, which Orca’s own documentation describes as a standard token that can be traded on exchanges, used as collateral and sent to any wallet. A freely tradable receipt is not a lock — the staker’s exposure never leaves the market — and the 7-day unstake cooldown is a redemption queue, not a lock-up. Counting that 2,141,290 as absorption would flatter this page by roughly three and a half percentage points on nothing real.

Foundation and overhang

ORCA’s overhang is unusually simple: it is one account. The community treasury at 5ooCx5vKiV2ZxAEKNNHAJjAJ7BARfLUZPGvgiApZjgFD holds 14,200,768 ORCA, which is 18.9% of total supply and 23.4% of the circulating float, and it is refreshed from the chain at every rebuild. Its owner key is the same multisig that still holds the ORCA mint authority, which concentrates two powers in one place. Its release pattern is sporadic rather than scheduled: 200,000 out on Oct 1 2025, then 641,654 out in two grant transfers on Mar 17 2026, and nothing since. Because there is no published calendar, the framework projects nothing forward and books Sell #3 at zero.

The second thing being watched is the staking vault at Ce5j11WAsSzM3nkzrw4Kw6v6ic3nbyqpv5eywjYKeKc5, which held 7,833,110 ORCA at the time of writing, up from 6,338,119 at the start of the window. That growth is 1,455,903 coins, of which only the 396,030 buyback leg is booked; the rest is staker deposits net of the 1,081,417 withdrawn, and neither of those legs is treated as supply entering or leaving the market. The trigger rule applies to both pools alike: if the treasury’s balance falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh, and if the vault’s buyback deposits stop or reverse, Buy #1 falls at the next refresh. Everything else on ORCA — exchange hot wallets, dispersed early-investor wallets — is excluded by design, because custodial balances belong to depositors and uncoordinated holders are noise, not overhang.

How ORCA compares to other fee-funded exchange tokens

ORCA belongs to the exchange-token class whose supply is fixed and whose only supply-side mechanism is what the protocol does with its own revenue. Against the uncapped, continuously emitting exchange tokens — the vote-escrow model that mints a fresh batch every week to pay liquidity providers — the contrast is total. Those tokens run a structural headwind of several percent a quarter and need a large voluntary lock just to hold level. ORCA has no headwind at all: the sell side of this page is literally empty, so every coin the buyback takes off the market moves the number in the holder’s favour. That is the strongest structural position in this class, and it is worth being clear that it comes from a governance decision to burn a quarter of the supply and stop issuing, not from protocol code that makes issuing impossible.

Against the other fixed-supply exchange tokens the comparison turns on destination. A token that routes fee revenue into a buy-and-burn removes coins permanently and its own supply figure falls, so every tracker sees the shrinkage. ORCA runs a buy-and-hold: the coins are parked in the staking vault to raise what each xORCA is worth, which is good for stakers but leaves the coins alive and, crucially, still inside the counted float. That is exactly why this page and a plain supply count disagree by 0.66 percentage points while both are correct about what they measure. The second difference is durability. A hard-coded halving schedule cannot be voted away; ORCA’s buyback rate was 20% until Jan 13 2026 and is 40% now, which means the same council that doubled it on Jan 13 2026 can halve it. ORCA’s deflation is a policy, and policies are revisable.

What to watch in the next 90 days

First, the buyback share itself. It moved from 20% to 40% of the protocol fee share on Jan 13 2026, and a single council update is all it takes to move it again in either direction — it is the highest-leverage number on this page. Second, trading volume, because the buyback is a fixed slice of fees rather than a fixed number of coins: fees ran about $104,000 a day over this window, and a sustained fall in volume shrinks the only buy row ORCA has. Third, the tokenholder proposal opened Feb 8 2026 and last discussed Jul 28 2026 to redeploy $4.8M of idle climate-fund reserves into ORCA buybacks — the council secretary replied on Jul 28 2026 that a treasury proposal needs a submitting wallet holding at least 500,000 ORCA, so it is unsponsored and has not executed, but at current prices it would be several times a quarter’s worth of buying if it ever did. Fourth, the community treasury: 14,200,768 ORCA that last moved on Mar 17 2026, where any new grant becomes real sell pressure the day it lands. Fifth, whether any bought-back ORCA is ever burned rather than held — the DAO has authorised burning as one option for repurchased coins, and the first burn would close most of the gap between this page and a plain supply count.

Summary

ORCA is a fixed-supply exchange token with no issuance whatsoever and a single live mechanism on the buy side. Over the 90 days to Aug 22 2026 the ORCA mint on Solana did not create one coin, vesting stayed finished, the community treasury did not move, and trading fees bought 396,030 ORCA on the open market across 2,128 purchases, for a net of −0.65% on a 60.8M circulating base — projected at the same rate for the next 90 days. Our supply monitor reads +0.01%, a 0.66-point gap that ships with a flag because the buyback parks its coins in a staking vault the float still counts, a classification the exact treasury subtraction confirms. The key risks are that ORCA’s deflation is a revocable policy rather than protocol code, that it is funded by trading volume that can fall, and that the mint authority on a supposedly capped token was never destroyed.

MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of ORCA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 22 2026.

Original: https://mrnasdog.com/research/orca/inflation · Data + explanation only. Not financial advice.