Leighton Cusack

Led product strategy and core protocol decisions for Orca during its formative development and market launch phases. Responsibilities included AMM parameter choices, pool fee design and the rollout of liquidity mining incentives that attracted initial LP deposits and on-chain volume. Architected the token distribution framework and governance transition path for the ORCA token, coordinating audits, tokenomics documents and community allocation schedules. Those concrete actions determined circulating supply dynamics and incentive timing, directly affecting trader behavior and yield expectations on Orca pools. Directed implementation of product features such as multi-hop routing, fee tiers and concentrated-liquidity style pools (Whirlpools), overseeing smart contract releases and security reviews. These deliveries changed how liquidity was provisioned on Solana and altered capital efficiency for LPs in Orca's ecosystem. Managed partnerships with wallets, aggregators and oracle providers to ensure integrations were production-ready at launch. The operational choices in deployment cadence and LP reward schedules had a measurable impact on initial depth, slippage characteristics and overall market competitiveness of ORCA trading pairs.