The future holds a million stablecoins. Today's infra isn't ready.
Introducing Orbital, an automated market maker for pools of 2, 3, or 10,000 stablecoins.
Orbital unlocks capital efficiency by bringing concentrated liquidity to higher dimensions.
w/ @danrobinson @ciamac
1/8
Here's a graph of the reserves of an automated market maker (AMM) between USDC and USDT.
Traders can put in USDC to take out USDT, and vice versa.
In the middle, where reserves are equal, the coins have the same price. At the edges, one is worthless compared to the other.
2/8
Uniswap V3, co-created by my coauthor @danrobinson, introduced the concept of concentrated liquidity.
It creates and consolidates mini-AMMs, called ticks, that support more trading for less money by restricting themselves to only a specified portion of the reserve curve.
3/8
Orbital extends concentrated liquidity to pools of three or more stables by drawing tick boundaries as orbits around the $1 equal price point.
Unlike 2D concentrated AMMs, even if one stablecoin depegs to 0, an Orbital tick can still use its reserves to trade the others.
4/8
Smaller Orbital ticks closer to the center don't need to hold capital in reserve to give out in case one of the coins depegs.
This lets LPs focus their resources as close as they like to where normal trading actually happens, unlocking significant capital efficiency gains.
5/8
The full Orbital AMM combines ticks of different sizes so LPs can customize their exposures.
Some might choose to focus narrowly around the $1 point for maximum efficiency, while others might provide wider coverage to earn fees during times of volatility.
6/8
Under the hood, Orbital ticks are n-dimensional spherical caps.
Thanks to symmetry, we can orbit some around the others to obtain a single toroid (donut-like) shape.
This lets us compute trades efficiently onchain regardless of the number of different coins in the pool.
7/8
Today, Orbital is just a design, but we're excited to see how it might change the stablecoin liquidity landscape.
If you're interested in exploring with us, we'd love to hear from you.
You can find the paper at
8/8paradigm.xyz/2025/06/orbital
animation by the inimitable @beesandbombs
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