Huma Finance

Huma Finance is the first PayFi (Payment Finance) network — a category it helped define — that bridges on-chain capital with real-world payment infrastructure. Rather than generating yield from token incentives or speculative trading activity, the protocol routes stablecoin liquidity to businesses that need short-term capital to settle cross-border payments, card transactions, and trade finance obligations. Liquidity is repaid rapidly, typically within one to five days, and the same capital recycles throughout the year to produce stable, compounding returns independent of crypto market cycles.

What Is PayFi?

PayFi is a term Huma Finance has championed to describe the intersection of Payment and Finance — specifically, using blockchain infrastructure to unlock the time value of money in global payment flows. Traditional payment systems require businesses to pre-fund SWIFT accounts and hold idle capital for days or weeks before settlements clear. Huma's network eliminates that capital inefficiency by providing short-term on-chain liquidity: payment businesses borrow stablecoins at daily rates of roughly 6–10 basis points, use them to settle obligations immediately, and repay once underlying payment flows complete. The protocol targets markets including cross-border remittances, credit card financing, and business-to-business trade finance.

Merger with Arf and Business Model

In April 2024, Huma merged with Arf, a Circle-backed platform focused on stablecoin-based cross-border settlement for licensed financial institutions and payment service providers. The merger significantly expanded Huma's institutional distribution: Arf's network of payment providers became the primary origination layer through which payment financing demand flows into Huma's liquidity pools. The combined entity joined the Circle Payments Network in October 2025 as a service provider, enabling capital-efficient stablecoin cross-border settlement at scale. In August 2025, a partnership with GeoSwift added real-time settlement capability for marketplace payments.

Protocol Architecture: Huma 2.0 on Solana

Huma Finance launched Huma 2.0 on Solana in April 2025, a permissionless and composable version of its liquidity protocol that opened access to retail depositors for the first time. Earlier iterations of the protocol operated on EVM-compatible chains with restricted access limited to institutional participants.

The core deposit mechanism on Solana operates through two modes:

Classic Mode mints PST (PayFi Strategy Token), a liquid, yield-bearing receipt token backed by USDC deposited into payment financing pools. PST holders earn stablecoin yield from the protocol's payment financing activity — approximately 8–10.5% USDC APY at launch — plus HUMA token rewards. PST is composable within Solana's DeFi ecosystem and integrates with Jupiter for swaps, Kamino for borrowing against PST collateral, and RateX for leveraged yield strategies. In June 2026, PST gained DEX liquidity access through a partnership with Fluid, using Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) for cross-chain yield distribution.

Maxi Mode mints mPST (Maxi PayFi Strategy Token) and forgoes USDC yield in exchange for substantially higher HUMA token reward multipliers, targeting users seeking governance and ecosystem token exposure over stablecoin income.

In January 2026, Huma launched Huma Prime, a new product mode that includes Defensive Looping — a disciplined leverage strategy vault that allows users to amplify exposure to PST yield through structured borrowing within defined risk parameters.

The protocol also maintains an institutional-grade track for licensed financial entities, which operates under access controls and compliance frameworks required for regulated counterparties.

Scale and Metrics

Huma Finance processed over 7 billion dollars in on-chain transactions as of 2026, supported by major backers including the Solana Foundation, Circle, and Galaxy Digital. Following the Huma 2.0 launch on Solana, active wallet addresses grew from approximately 5,600 to 33,000 — a 490% increase — within weeks of launch. Q4 2025 originations through Huma pools totaled 1.1 billion dollars, up 24.4% quarter-over-quarter from 860.6 million dollars in Q3 2025. Annualized protocol revenue reached 17 million dollars in August 2025, representing approximately 16x year-over-year growth.

Security and Audits

Huma Finance maintains audit coverage across all three of its deployment chains. Solana programs have been audited by Halborn (covering Huma 2.0, the Institutional deployment, and incremental updates) and by Sec3 (covering Huma Prime and the Huma Vault). EVM smart contracts have been reviewed twice by Spearbit, with the most recent audit completed in November 2024. Stellar contracts received an audit from Certora. The protocol maintains an active bug bounty program in partnership with Spearbit/Cantina and implements multisig controls for administrative functions alongside endpoint detection monitoring.

In 2023, a security incident on the protocol's then-deprecated Polygon V1 BaseCreditPool contracts resulted in a loss of approximately 101,400 dollars. The exploit targeted flawed account validation logic in the older codebase; active user funds and the Solana-based Huma 2.0 infrastructure were not affected.

Team and Background

Huma Finance was founded in 2022 by Erbil Karaman and Richard Liu. Karaman previously led product and growth at Lyft, EarnIn, and Meta. The broader core team has backgrounds from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Patrick Campos joined as Chief Business Officer in February 2025; he previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at Securrency, a blockchain-based capital markets infrastructure company. The company's smart contract development is housed under the GitHub organization 00labs.

Fundraising

In September 2024, Huma raised 38 million dollars, structured as 10 million dollars in equity and 28 million dollars invested through yield-bearing tokenized real-world assets. The equity round was led by Distributed Global, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, and TIBAS Ventures (the CVC arm of Isbank, Turkey's largest private bank). The Stellar Development Foundation contributed 10 million dollars as part of the raise. The funds were directed toward expanding the PayFi network to Solana and Stellar's Soroban smart-contract environment.

HUMA Token

The HUMA governance and utility token launched in August 2025 with a total supply of 10 billion tokens and an initial circulating supply of 17.33%. Token distribution allocates 31% to LP and ecosystem incentives, 20.6% to seed and Series A investors, 19.3% to the team and advisors, 11.1% to the protocol treasury, 7% to CEX listings and marketing, and 5% to the initial airdrop. Investor and team allocations carry an 18-month lock-up followed by quarterly linear release over three years.

HUMA serves governance (holders stake tokens to earn voting weight and participate in protocol parameter decisions), liquidity provider incentives, and ecosystem partner rewards tied to transaction volume and protocol revenue.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Huma Finance brings a category of yield to Solana that does not depend on DeFi-native activity. Its PST token is integrated across the Solana liquidity layer — tradeable on Jupiter, usable as collateral on Kamino, and accessible for leveraged strategies on RateX — making payment financing yield composable within the broader ecosystem. The protocol's permissionless design allows any USDC holder to access institutional-grade payment financing exposure previously available only to family offices and institutional capital. As real-world asset tokenization expands on Solana, Huma's infrastructure positions it as a foundational liquidity layer connecting on-chain capital to global payment flows.