Orca partners with billion-$-company to foster ecosystem growth

• Prominent Solana DEX Orca has partnered with Stripe to enable direct crypto purchases with fiat.
• The move could see more adoption for Solana and drive SOL to new price highs.

Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Orca has become the first automated market maker (AMM) protocol across any blockchain network to partner with financial services and software company, Stripe.

Orca revealed in a Medium post that the partnership with Stripe is to implement a seamless fiat-onramp on the DEX. Users can now convert fiat currency to crypto with ease right in Orca’s user interface (UI) through an integration with the Stripe-built Link.

To use the feature, podmates—as Orca users are called—just need to connect their wallet to orca.so, open the token tab and click the dollar sign. This will then direct the user to Stripe’s simple order flow, allowing for the purchase of SPL tokens including USDC and SOL with fiat currency.

We’re excited to introduce our first product built for Web3: A fiat-to-crypto onramp. Let your users buy crypto with @ethereum, @solana, @0xPolygon, and @Bitcoin *within* your Web3 app. It’s customizable, embeddable, and handles KYC, payments, fraud, and compliance for you. ⬇️ https://t.co/aMr8qgvkhM

— Guillaume Poncin (@gponcin) December 1, 2022

The tokens purchased will then be transferred back to your wallet, where they will appear in the token panel. The post added that the entire purchase flow with fiat funds is handled exclusively through Link by Stripe and not by Orca.

The feature, which is currently only available for users in the U.S., removes the need to buy crypto from other exchanges first to be able to explore the Orca ecosystem. In a statement, co-founder of Orca Ori Kawn said that the integration will make participation in the DeFi ecosystem even more accessible for the entire Solana community. Kawn said stated;

A core part of Orca’s mission is to enable broader economic access. With this new integration, we hope to make participating in the DeFi ecosystem even more accessible to the entire Solana community,

Stripe partnership bullish for Orca and SOL

Orca, which launched in February 2021, lets users trade Solana SPL tokens through its AMM protocol. The permissionless smart-contracts run platform has aimed to set itself apart from other DEX by focusing on usability.

Stripe, meanwhile, has also been partnering with other Web3 projects since it began to become more receptive to the crypto space last year. One of the world’s largest fintech firms, Stripe has also teamed up with the likes of Polygon to enable its clients to pay freelancers, merchants, and content creators in crypto.

The partnership is a positive to the Solana ecosystem that has recently seen investor confidence plunge as a result of the FTX collapse. The price of SOL has plunged 56 price in the last month. SOL is trading at around $13.75, down 0.71 percent in the last 24 hours per the latest price data. However, some optimism still lingers as investors still expect to see SOL cross $20 in the coming days.