Orca API: 14 keyless endpoints, no candles, no trade feed

Search "orca api" and you can land somewhere unrelated fast. Orca Security is a cloud security company, and it has nothing to do with what follows. This Orca is a decentralized exchange on Solana, built on a concentrated-liquidity protocol called Whirlpools, and it publishes a public API of its own.

Inside the Orca API: pools, protocol stats and tokens

Orca ships SDKs in TypeScript, Rust and Python for building and sending swap transactions on-chain. The public API is a separate thing, the read path: no wallet, no transaction, just data. Its interactive explorer lives at api.orca.so/docs and loads an OpenAPI document with exactly 14 paths. Grouped by what they are for:

It is keyless. Nothing to register for, no header to send:

Call a single pool and the response is a lot richer than a summary line: current price, TVL, tick data, fee tier, and volume and fees broken out over 24h, 7d and 30d, all in one object. For "describe this Orca pool" or "what is Orca's own account of its volume right now," this is the source to use, and it costs nothing to call.

The two things that are thin or missing

I searched the whole specification, paths and schemas both, for the words you would expect if either feature existed: ohlc, candle, kline, chart, trade, tx and transaction. Only trade turned up, inside a pool field called tradeEnableTimestamp, and the rest came back at zero. swap appears seven times, but never as an endpoint: it shows up inside an adaptive-fee object as lastMajorSwapTimestamp, and as an assetSwapUrl link field on a token record. Neither is a trade feed.

There is no OHLC candle endpoint. The single pool endpoint does carry a field called priceHistory7d, and it is worth being precise about what that is, because it is not nothing. Its own schema describes it as "historical prices for the past 7 days (oldest to newest, one per 12 hours, 14 data points)": a plain array of numbers, no timestamps attached to the points, no open, high or low, no volume alongside the price. You can plot a rough line from it, nothing sharper: no candlestick chart, no chosen interval, no look back past 7 days.

There is no swap or trade feed. Who traded, how much, and at what price is not in this API at any endpoint. The fallback: parse transactions yourself against the Whirlpools program, whose address (whirLbMiicVdio4qvUfM5KAg6Ct8VwpYzGff3uctyCc) is the same across every Orca pool, or read them from an index that already does the parsing.

Neither gap is a knock on Orca. The API serves the Orca interface, TVL, current price, pool search, and both absences sit outside what that interface needs to render.

Orca carried 8.1% of Solana DEX volume on 23 September 2026

This decides whether an Orca-only integration fits what you are building. Here is every DEX DexPaprika indexed on Solana that day, by 24 hour volume:

Orca's one entry is $351,148,170, which is 8.1% of the day, third behind PumpSwap at 67.5% and Meteora DAAM v2 at 9.8%. Divide volume by pool count and Orca's 4,568 pools did about $76,900 each, ahead of Raydium CLMM's $56,900 and well ahead of Raydium's own AMM at $4,950 a pool.

That split matters for what an Orca-only integration is good at: strong on established pairs, and silent, with no error, on anything freshly launched.

What a Solana DEX API adds

Orca's API can only ever answer questions about Orca. Ask it to compare an Orca pool's volume against Raydium's, or check whether a token trades better on Meteora, and there is nowhere in the specification to send that question.

We measured Raydium's own API the same way, and the gap looks nearly identical: real, free, useful for what it covers, silent outside it. The full Raydium comparison is a companion piece to this one.

Candles and swaps for an Orca pool

The two things missing from Orca's own API are exactly what a DEX data API exists to provide. I ran both calls below on 23 September 2026 against Orca's busiest Whirlpool, the SOL/USDC pool doing $162m a day. The candles work without a key; since 30 September 2026 the swap feed needs a Dev or Pro plan.

Hourly candles, which Orca's API cannot give you at any depth:

That returns an array of candles, each carrying time_open, time_close, open, high, low, close and volume, at whatever interval you ask for, instead of Orca's fixed 12 hours.

Individual swaps, which are not in Orca's API at all, on api-pro.dexpaprika.com with your key on its own in the Authorization header:

Each row carries sender and recipient, token_0_symbol and token_1_symbol, both amounts, price_0_usd and price_1_usd, plus created_at, created_at_block_number and log_index. A factory_id field carries the program address, whirLbMiicVdio4qvUfM5KAg6Ct8VwpYzGff3uctyCc for this one, so on a chain where several protocols share liquidity-routing infrastructure, you can confirm which program settled the trade.

The same two calls work unchanged against Raydium, Meteora, PumpSwap and everything else in the table above.

Keyless is enough to try the candles. A free key from console.dexpaprika.com raises the rate and the quota, and current numbers for every tier are on the pricing page rather than in this article, because they move. Free-tier data can be up to 60 seconds behind; real-time is the paid tier.

Common questions

Does Orca have an API?

Yes. The Orca Public API at api.orca.so/v2/solana, 14 endpoints, documented at docs.orca.so with an interactive explorer at api.orca.so/docs, distinct from Orca Security, the unrelated cloud security company.

Do you need an API key for Orca?

No, for read access. Every endpoint I called on 23 September 2026 answered 200 with no key and no authentication header of any kind.

What are the Orca API rate limits?

Orca's docs describe rate limiting and a 429 response if you exceed it, but do not publish a number or window. Pace calls and back off on anything but a 200.

Does the Orca API give historical prices or OHLCV?

Not candles. The pool endpoint carries priceHistory7d, described in Orca's own specification as 14 price points over 7 days, one every 12 hours, with no timestamps and no open, high or low. There is no endpoint for a chosen interval or a longer window.

Can I get Orca swap history from the API?

Not from Orca's own API. Per-trade data means parsing Solana transactions against the Whirlpools program yourself, or reading them from an index that already does.

Which Solana DEX should I index for a given token?

On 23 September 2026, PumpSwap carried two thirds of the chain's indexed DEX volume, and Pump.fun held 45,358 pools, more than any other venue in the table above. Orca's strength sits at the other end: established pairs, not fresh launches. Covering one venue only will misprice something eventually.

How these numbers were measured

Everything above was read off a live source on 23 September 2026.

The endpoint count and the groupings come from Orca's own OpenAPI document, which its api.orca.so/docs page loads as an inline JSON block. I parsed that document rather than the rendered page, so 14 is the specification's own count, not mine. The absence of candle and trade endpoints is a search across all 14 paths and their schemas for the terms listed above. The priceHistory7d description is quoted verbatim from that same specification.

The Orca protocol figures are one keyless GET /protocol call. The Solana table is one call to DexPaprika's DEX list for Solana (GET /networks/solana/dexes), which returns all nine rows in one response, so the rows and the total agree by construction. Shares are of DexPaprika-indexed DEX volume on Solana, not of the whole chain. The OHLCV and transaction calls are quoted verbatim and both returned 200.

Every volume figure is a 24 hour window closing on the measurement, so expect movement, especially in Solana's composition: PumpSwap and Meteora DAAM v2 both live on token-launch activity that moves fast. Orca's own ranking, third by volume with the fifth-highest pool count, reads steadier, since Whirlpools skews toward established pairs.

Full REST reference at docs.dexpaprika.com. There is a per-DEX page with a live swap feed for Orca on Solana. For the protocol side, Orca's own documentation is at docs.orca.so, and the Whirlpools SDKs are on GitHub.

The same question for another Solana DEX: what the Raydium API covers, and what a Solana DEX API adds.