Orca's Whirlpools are concentrated-liquidity pools: you provide liquidity inside a price range you choose, not across the whole curve. That makes impermanent loss behave differently from a classic pool — and Orca deliberately calls it divergence loss to name the cause. This guide walks through Orca's own worked example, the narrow-vs-wide range trade-off, and how to estimate the number for any Orca pool.
Impermanent loss is the difference in value between providing liquidity and simply holding the deposited tokens. Orca uses the term divergence loss (DL) "because it describes what causes the difference: the prices of the deposited assets diverge from their original ratio" (Orca documentation). Two clarifications from Orca that trip people up:
Orca documents a concrete SOL/USDC case. Assume 1 USDC = $1, an initial SOL price of $200, a selected range of $160–$250, and a deposit of 2.5 SOL ($500) plus 500 USDC — $1,000 total. These figures exclude fees, rewards, slippage, and taxes.
| Scenario | LP position value | If you had held | Divergence loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOL falls to $170 | ~$896 (≈4.5 SOL + 130 USDC) | ~$925 | ~$29 |
| SOL rises to $250 | ~$1,059 | ~$1,125 | ~$66 |
The second row is the instructive one. At $250 the position is worth about $1,059 — up from the original $1,000 — yet it still trails the ~$1,125 you would have had by holding. That $66 gap is divergence loss even though the position "made money." Source: Orca, Impermanent Loss.
Because Whirlpools concentrate liquidity into your chosen band, range width is the single most important choice an Orca LP makes. Orca frames it directly:
| Range choice | Effect on fees | Effect on impermanent loss |
|---|---|---|
| Narrow range | Higher share of fees while in range | Greater concentration → more sensitivity to price movement |
| Wide range | Lower fee share (liquidity spread out) | Less sensitivity to price movement |
And there is a hard edge: "if price moves outside your selected range, your position may become fully one-sided" — you end up holding only the token that fell, and the position accrues no swap fees until price re-enters the band. A tight range is a bet that price stays put long enough for the extra fees to outrun the extra divergence loss.
To turn this into a number for your own position you need the deposit prices, the current (or hypothetical) prices, and your range. The free TraderBear impermanent loss calculator works for Orca pools: paste an Orca pool address to auto-fill live prices, or enter prices by hand. It computes IL, runs 5,000 Monte-Carlo price paths so you see the full distribution of outcomes rather than one point estimate, and reports LP-return-vs-HODL with Sharpe and net APR so fee income is weighed against divergence loss. Everything runs client-side — no wallet connection, no signup.
To name the cause — the two assets' prices diverging from their deposit ratio — and to stress that it is relative to holding, not always an absolute loss versus your original deposit.
Yes. A narrower range concentrates capital, raising fee income while in range but increasing sensitivity to price moves. A wider range is gentler on IL but earns fewer fees.
The position becomes fully one-sided (all of the token that fell) and stops earning swap fees until price re-enters the range.
Paste the pool address into the free calculator to auto-fill prices, or enter them manually. It returns IL, a Monte-Carlo distribution, and net APR vs. holding.
Paste an Orca pool address or enter prices. Get the IL number, a 5,000-path Monte-Carlo distribution, and LP-vs-HODL net APR. Browser-only, no signup.
Open the IL calculator →