What’s next for Orion?
Increasing volume, improving infrastructure, and building industry-first features.

Few industries are as fast paced as this one, nor see as many ‘industry-firsts’ being announced, developed, and launched daily. At Orion, we are continually building solutions that have never been built before. We’re constantly pushing boundaries to deliver solutions that will revolutionize not only trading, but the digital asset space as we currently know it. As a result, anticipating every potential roadblock or barrier (whether internal or external) becomes incredibly difficult, if not near-impossible. This space is changing daily and we all have to be able to effectively adapt.

In the last few months alone, we’ve built (and are continuing to build) several critical features that weren’t even on our radar a matter of months ago, let alone our roadmap. Orion Bridge, Orion Pool, and Orion’s upcoming NFT aggregator and USDo stablecoin are just a few developments that we’ve prioritized recently in order to grow with the moving tides of the industry. 

While everything previously on our roadmap remains a priority for the next six months, some solutions have become more urgent than others as sentiment and markets change. 

So where are we now? What’s our focus, and what’s next?

In order to remain fluid, adaptable, and thus competitive, we have recalibrated our roadmap to focus on our current priorities, versus set dates. We will continue to update the community as our priorities progress and evolve, and as new opportunities arise. 

With that in mind, our priorities for the coming months are as follows, and our development teams are split accordingly:

• Increasing volume
• Improving infrastructure
• Building new features

Increasing Volume

Naturally, driving volume to the terminal, and protocol, is of utmost importance to us. Not only will this cement our position as a leading aggregator in the space, but will enable us to effectively launch Main Net Staking, with staking rewards coming from transactions versus reserves. Our immediate focuses to drive volume to the protocol include:

3rd Party Pool Listings

From July, third party projects will be able to self-list on Orion Pool. Not only will this bring a significant number of new assets and pairs to the terminal, it will drive more volume as it opens up a decentralized point of access to a number of assets and their respective communities. As we’ve said, we have a significant number of projects waiting to list upon launch - from million to billon dollar market cap projects - and will continue to list new projects beyond launch.

B2B Solutions

Our next priorities are our B2B solutions, including our Whitelabel DEX solution for exchanges (more to come on this), Liquidity Boost Plugin, Enterprise Trade Widget, Launchpad Liquidity, and Wallet Swap SDK. These will drive significant volume to the protocol through our partners alone, and we will ensure certain solutions are live before launching Main Net Staking

Improving Infrastructure

Continuing to develop our infrastructure, as well as our ecosystem, is key for us to deliver the decentralized gateway to the digital asset market. While our plans to improve our infrastructure are extensive, below are some of the key milestones and priorities:

USDo Stablecoin

Today, we announced even further utility will be added to our native ORN token by introducing USDo, our dollar-pegged stablecoin.  As per traditional stablecoins, USDo can be used for trading and additional transactions within Orion Terminal. When users stake ORN or ORN LP tokens on Orion Terminal, they will be able to mint USDo - collateralized using the staked ORN. USDo will become a primary base token of trading pairs on the Orion Terminal and will become integral to the project, allowing ORN holders to maximize their capital efficiency within the Orion ecosystem. This further the adoption of ORN to mint USDo, driving an increase in TVL on Orion Terminal.

Integrating Exchanges

Our next step following the launch of Orion Pool is to integrate leading swap pools into the Terminal, including Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and SushiSwap. Once integrated we’ll have to manually add assets, but it’s a much quicker and simpler process than adding via CEX. When we add new assets via CEXs, we have to ensure brokers have the necessary funds in their accounts, test each asset against every pair, etc. This won’t be the case with integrating new assets via swap pools as it’ll just be a matter of whitelisting, so this will significantly expand our liquidity and assets available. Furthermore, this will allow even more lucrative arbitrage opportunities across centralized and decentralized liquidity sources.

Chain Integrations

As a chain-agnostic aggregator, integrating new chains into the terminal will allow us to provide our users with greater choice over their trading experience, alongside lower transactional fees, faster settlement, and critically, bring their native assets to the terminal. While Cardano, Huobi ECO Chain, Elrond, Polkadot, Avalanche, and Fantom have been announced, we have omitted dates for these chains to be integrated into the terminal. This is because their integration cannot be solely controlled by our internal development teams - it also depends on each respective chain’s ability to be integrated. We will prioritize those chains that become available to us first.

Main Net Staking

As we have reiterated, launching Main Net Staking is of utmost importance to us. Before we launch this, we want to ensure that we are driving significant volume to the protocol consistently in order to deliver strong APYs for our ORN holders. The launch of main net staking will also open up access to individual brokers on the network, bringing in potentially unlimited sources of liquidity to the terminal via any exchange connected to our brokers.

Building Industry-First Features

With our goal to become the ‘decentralized gateway to the digital asset market’, this requires expanding our offering beyond spot trading, and even beyond crypto assets. As well as our own internal development and solutions, we have an incredible number of partnerships that will further our offering on Orion Terminal.

NFT Marketplace

Launching the industry’s first NFT aggregator with Cardano will be a huge step for the fragmented NFT space, while allowing us to attract new audiences of traders. This is our priority feature over the coming months, and we are making significant headway in its development.

Margin Trading / Lending

Our next priority will be offering decentralized margin trading / lending. As we’ve seen recently, leveraged, centralized exchanges have been quick to cut off access in the midst of mass-liquidations. In volatile markets, ownership of assets is more important than ever. Having your assets held by a third-party centralized exchange limits your control of your own funds. At any point, your access can be denied and withdrawal of funds remains unavailable, and while this can be frustrating and certainly costly with spot trading, it can be significant when leverage trading. Through aggregating the liquidity of and depth of all major centralized exchanges, Orion Protocol will be the first project to enable high-margin trading not seen on a decentralized platform. Orion Terminal will be able to earn passive income on assets by lending their assets in our decentralized margin trading solution, allowing traders to retain ownership of their assets.

Partner Integrations

Our partner ecosystem was not built for optics. Once we have evolved our offering internally, we plan to do so via our partner ecosystem, introducing insurance, leveraged ETFs, trading bots, derivatives, contract trading, staking of any digital asset type, and much more to the Terminal.

With so much coming up, we hope you’ll share our excitement for the months ahead, and understand the need for us to be flexible and adaptable in order to stay competitive in this ever-evolving space. We will continue to update the community on our priorities as they evolve - be sure to keep following our announcements for more updates!