Orca and Loopscale merge into Formation to build capital markets for AI

What the merger combines

According to the announcement, the deal brings together Orca's trading and liquidity infrastructure with Loopscale's credit and vault infrastructure. Formation says it wants to give emerging assets a path from issuance to financing and liquidity, and to expand the range of assets and strategies available to capital allocators.

Both the Orca and Loopscale protocols will remain the foundation of the ORCA and xORCA token network. Formation plans to build new, unified capabilities across origination, vault strategies and distribution on top of the existing protocols.

The leadership team consists of Luke Truitt as Chief Executive Officer, Mary Gooneratne as Chief Operating Officer, and Christopher Montagano as Chief Strategy & Legal Officer.

The capital demand behind the deal

The companies point to growing financing needs in AI, energy, robotics and defense. The release cites an Apollo estimate that nearly $3 trillion will be needed for AI infrastructure alone through 2028.

Many of the companies driving that demand, the announcement argues, do not fit neatly into traditional capital market structures, where fixed underwriting, legal, servicing and distribution costs favor larger, standardized deals. Formation says it will broaden access to capital by reducing the cost and complexity of structuring, distributing and financing assets.

"The frontier economy is creating new business models and financing needs more rapidly than traditional market infrastructure is evolving to serve them," said Truitt, according to the release.

Track record and partners

The companies say Orca has processed more than $550 billion in trading volume since 2021. Loopscale has more than $150 million in deposits and has facilitated more than $2 billion in loans. The boilerplate section of the release, however, states that Orca has processed more than $500 billion in trading volume since 2021.

Orca is described as a decentralized exchange on Solana. Loopscale is described as a credit and vault infrastructure platform.

Formation says it is already working with Figure, Shinhan Asset Management, Superstate, R3 and Securitize to bring new assets to market and expand distribution. Reid Simon, President of Digital Assets at Figure Technology Solutions, Inc., said Figure has originated over $30 billion of credit onchain and scaled tokenized products to more than $650 million in DeFi. He added that his company has worked closely with both teams over the past year.

What comes next

Formation says it is building across origination, issuance, liquidity, credit and distribution, with a path into regulated U.S. capital markets. Over the next 12 months, the team plans to introduce new tools for issuers and capital allocation strategies alongside its existing trading, lending and vault offerings.

The release carries standard caveats. Planned products are subject to legal and regulatory requirements and may not be available in all jurisdictions or to U.S. persons. The announcement is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security or financial product, and actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking statements.

For issuers of emerging and tokenized assets, the pitch is a single route from launch to financing and liquidity. Whether Formation delivers on that depends on products that, per the company, are still to be introduced over the coming year.