Money moves slowly. Huma made the wait a business.
Here is a fact that quietly runs the world: when a business sends money across a border, or waits for a card transaction to settle, the cash does not arrive when the deal is done. It arrives days later. In between, the money exists - it is owed, it is real - but it just sits there, doing nothing, while the business that earned it needs it now.
Huma Finance is a bet that this gap is not a nuisance but a market. The company calls its category PayFi, short for Payment Financing, and as far as anyone can tell Huma coined the term. The mechanism is old-fashioned in the way good financial mechanisms usually are: a business with a receivable it can't touch yet borrows against it, pays a small fee for the convenience, and gets its cash today instead of Thursday.
What makes it interesting is where the lending money comes from. Instead of a bank, Huma runs pools of stablecoins - USDC - that anyone can deposit into. When a payment company borrows to settle a transaction instantly, it pays a fee. That fee flows back to the depositors as yield. It is, in other words, a two-sided marketplace where one side wants speed and the other side wants return, and Huma sits in the middle taking a spread and running the plumbing on Solana.
The yield here is the part worth pausing on. A lot of crypto yield is, to put it politely, circular - tokens paying tokens to hold tokens. Huma's yield traces back to an actual business paying an actual fee to move actual money faster. That doesn't make it risk-free. But it does make it the kind of number that has a reason to exist, which in this corner of finance is rarer than it should be.
Two products, one flywheel
Huma 2.0
Deposit USDC and pick a lane. Classic Mode mints a PayFi Strategy Token (PST) that earns roughly 9% USDC APY plus "Feather" rewards. Maxi Mode forgoes the cash yield for more Feathers - a bet on the network's future over its present coupon.
Huma Institutional
Compliant pools built for payment institutions, cross-border remitters, and card-settlement businesses that need real, regulated onchain liquidity - not a demo.
PayFi Protocol
Smart contracts connect depositors to borrowers across 11+ active lending pools. Borrowers get instant settlement; lenders get the fees. Everything clears onchain.
HUMA Token
Launched on Solana in May 2025 with a 10-billion total supply. Rewards liquidity providers, community contributors, and ecosystem partners. Season 1's airdrop sent 5% of supply to early adopters, mostly LPs.
The flywheel, in bars
Cumulative transaction volume (approx.)
Two weeks after Huma 2.0 went live on Solana, the network had already routed more than $4 billion in transactions. Deposits in that product jumped 132% quarter-over-quarter, from roughly $65 million to $152 million by the end of Q3 2025.
Credit originations - the money actually lent to move payments - climbed past $2.3 billion cumulatively. Numbers like these are the whole argument: the yield is only as real as the volume underneath it, and the volume kept showing up.
Built by operators, not tourists
CEO Richard Liu spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch Google Fi. The rest of the founding team is cut from similar cloth - people who shipped consumer and payments products at scale before deciding that cross-border settlement was worth rebuilding from the rails up.
The team is remote-first and, by crypto standards, small. Which fits the product: PayFi isn't a meme, it's infrastructure, and infrastructure tends to be built by people who have watched something break in production.
$46.3M raised - and a telling investor list
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $8.3M | Feb 2023 | Race Capital, Distributed Global, ParaFi |
| Series A | $38M | Sep 2024 | Distributed Global (lead), HashKey, Folius, Stellar Development Foundation, TIBAS Ventures |
Read the Series A cap table and you notice something unusual: the Stellar Development Foundation wrote a $10 million check, and TIBAS Ventures - the venture arm of İşbank, Turkey's largest private bank - joined too. When a blockchain foundation and a traditional bank fund the same "DeFi" round, it usually means the thing being funded touches the real economy. Huma also merged with Arf, a global payment-liquidity provider, in 2024, folding payment rails directly into the network.
From idea to $4.5 billion
Huma Finance founded
Ex-Google, ex-Meta, and fintech operators set out to bring payment financing onchain.
$8.3M seed round
First institutional lending pools go live.
Arf merger
Huma merges with a global liquidity provider, uniting PayFi with payment rails.
$38M Series A
Distributed Global leads; Stellar invests $10M.
Huma 2.0 on Solana
Permissionless product crosses $4B in transactions within two weeks.
HUMA token launches
Governance token debuts in May with a Season 1 airdrop to early liquidity providers.
The short version
What is Huma Finance?
Huma Finance is the first PayFi (Payment Financing) network - a blockchain protocol that provides instant stablecoin settlement liquidity for payment businesses and pays yield to the liquidity providers who fund it.
What is PayFi?
PayFi, short for Payment Financing, is a category coined by Huma where onchain liquidity is lent against real-world payment receivables so businesses can settle cross-border and card payments in seconds instead of days.
How do liquidity providers earn yield?
LPs deposit USDC into Huma's pools. Borrowers pay fees to access that liquidity for instant settlement, and those fees are distributed to LPs as yield - currently around 9% APY in Huma 2.0's Classic Mode.
Who founded Huma and when?
Huma was founded in 2022 by Richard Liu (CEO, a seven-year Google veteran who helped launch Google Fi), Erbil Karaman, Ji Peng, and Lei Du.
What is the HUMA token?
HUMA is Huma's utility and governance token, launched on Solana on May 26, 2025, with a total supply of 10 billion, used to reward liquidity providers, community members, and ecosystem partners.