At 22:43 UTC on October 7, 2026, Formation announced that Orca and Loopscale had merged under a new company called Formation. The announcement says Orca has processed more than $550 billion in trading volume since 2021, while Loopscale has facilitated more than $2 billion in loans and holds over $150 million in deposits.
The combined company is headquartered in New York City. Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt is its chief executive, Mary Gooneratne is chief operating officer, and Christopher Montagano is chief strategy and legal officer. Formation brings Orca’s trading and liquidity infrastructure together with Loopscale’s credit and vault products.
The merger does not require an immediate user migration. Formation says both applications will continue operating as before and that existing positions, loans and vault deposits are unaffected. Orca separately told traders and liquidity providers that every Whirlpool position, fee and reward remains in place, with nothing to withdraw, migrate or sign. Loopscale gave the same assurance for every loan, Loop and vault position, and said Loopscale points will continue accruing.
What Formation combines
Orca supplies the trading layer. Its Whirlpools let investors trade against liquidity supplied by LPs. Riptide lets professional market makers operate their own automated market maker strategies. Permissioned pools restrict trading to approved participants. These structures give Formation several ways to create secondary markets for assets with different access and liquidity requirements.
Loopscale supplies credit and managed allocation. Its order book matches borrowers and lenders through fixed-rate loans with terms set by lenders for specific assets. The announcement says this architecture supports bespoke lending products, complex collateral, permissioned assets and Orca LP positions.
The vault layer consists of Loopscale Earn Vaults and Loopscale Asset Curation. Earn Vaults allocate across strategies involving yield, credit and market making. The curation team structures those strategies and connects issuers with liquidity providers and other participants. Formation presents the three layers as one path for an issuer to launch an asset, establish trading, add borrowing and collateral uses, and attract capital through vault strategies.
Formation describes a cycle between those products. Deeper liquidity helps investors enter and exit positions and can make an asset more useful as collateral. Credit and Loop products create additional uses for the asset and generate trading activity. Vaults direct allocator capital into those markets. This is the commercial case for putting the three functions under one company, although the announcement does not say that their contracts or risk systems have already been combined.
The company says it is already working with Figure, Shinhan Asset Management, Superstate, R3 and Securitize. Its stated product direction covers tokenized fixed income, equities and other assets, as well as issuer tools, allocation strategies and new credit, market-making and vault infrastructure. No launch date is given for a unified Formation application or for any of those new products.
Formation also plans to pursue regulated U.S. market access. The announcement says the company intends to operate a tokenized securities venue under the SEC framework issued on September 17 and seek the licences needed to expand its offerings. It does not identify the licences, application dates or target launch date.
What changes for users and operators
The immediate operational message is continuity. Existing users still access Orca and Loopscale through their current applications. The merger does not move positions into a new contract or require a new signature, according to the teams. That matters because unsolicited migration links or signature requests would conflict with the published instructions. Users can verify product notices against the official Orca, Loopscale and Formation accounts before taking action.
Token mechanics also remain unchanged for now. Orca said that both protocols remain the foundation of the $ORCA and $xORCA token network and that $xORCA staking continues as it does today. The announcement does not describe a new Formation token, a token conversion, a change to staking contracts or revised governance rights.
For borrowers and lenders, Loopscale’s order-book model continues to set fixed-rate terms by asset. For Orca LPs, Whirlpool positions, fees and rewards continue without migration. The merger therefore changes the company and future product roadmap before it changes the protocol interfaces used to manage capital.
The planned integration could reduce the number of separate counterparties an asset issuer must coordinate. Formation says issuers currently assemble liquidity, credit and vault distribution through separate diligence reviews, technical integrations and commercial agreements. The combined company intends to provide one team across those functions. Whether the underlying contracts and risk controls will also be integrated is not stated.
Allocators still face protocol-specific risks. A vault strategy may deploy capital across yield, credit and market-making venues, while lending terms remain asset-specific and Orca liquidity depends on the market structure selected. The announcement describes a common product stack, but it does not publish consolidated disclosures for collateral valuation, liquidations, vault mandates, counterparty exposure or permissioning. Those details will determine whether Formation offers one risk framework or packages several existing systems behind one commercial relationship.
What remains open
Formation names origination, issuance, liquidity, credit and distribution as its intended scope. The team says an initial set of products for allocators seeking tokenized assets and investment opportunities remains available on Orca and Loopscale today. It has not published a timetable for a combined interface, new contracts, integrated vaults or its planned tokenized securities venue.
The next verifiable changes will be the first shared product and any regulatory application the company makes public. Until then, users have explicit instructions to keep using the existing protocols without withdrawing, migrating or signing anything for the merger.
