Yumi Finance

Yumi Finance is a Credit-as-a-Service platform built on Solana's stablecoin rails, enabling fintech applications to embed unsecured credit products — buy now, pay later (BNPL), revolving credit lines, and B2B trade finance — without building their own underwriting or capital management infrastructure. The project launched in 2025, won first prize in the DeFi track at the Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon, and was subsequently accepted into [[PROJECT:925]]'s fourth accelerator cohort, placing it at the leading edge of onchain credit innovation on Solana.

The Problem: Credit Infrastructure Is a Bottleneck

Most fintech platforms that want to offer credit products face the same obstacle: building the underwriting stack, sourcing loan capital, and managing collections is expensive, slow, and operationally risky. Traditional credit infrastructure is designed for banks, not for crypto-native apps. Meanwhile, onchain credit has historically required borrowers to post overcollateralized collateral — a significant UX barrier that excludes the mass market of consumers and businesses who need unsecured credit.

Yumi Finance was built to remove that bottleneck. Its positioning — "financial systems for assets banks can't underwrite" — signals an intent to extend credit to underserved categories through a combination of onchain and traditional data assessment, all running on stablecoin payment rails.

How Yumi Finance Works

Yumi operates as a three-layer credit stack that fintech partners access via API and SDK:

Underwriting and Risk Engine: Yumi evaluates credit applicants using a multi-source data model that combines onchain behavioral data (transaction history, wallet age, DeFi activity), offchain data, and traditional credit signals. This blended approach allows Yumi to underwrite users who may lack conventional credit history but have demonstrable onchain activity, expanding the addressable market beyond traditional lending demographics.

Financing Layer: Rather than requiring partners to hold loan capital on their balance sheets, Yumi supplies the capital itself and manages distribution to loan recipients. Repayments flow back to capital providers according to agreed-upon terms. Partners carry zero credit risk — Yumi assumes default exposure entirely.

Servicing Layer: Yumi handles the operational mechanics of credit products after origination: repayment scheduling, automated reminders, delinquency workflows, and collections. This removes the back-office burden that typically makes credit products uneconomical for smaller platforms.

The result is a credit stack that most partner teams can integrate in under a week of development work, using a standard API and SDK that plugs into existing fintech infrastructure.

Product Lines

Yumi Finance offers three distinct credit products, each tailored to a different distribution channel:

Credit SDK for Crypto Cards: Card programs — whether consumer or business — can offer unsecured credit lines to their users without holding credit risk themselves. Yumi underwrites each cardholder, sets appropriate limits, and manages the credit lifecycle behind the scenes.

BNPL SDK for Merchants: Checkout platforms and merchant-facing applications can embed pay-in-installments options directly into their payment flows. Credit lines start at approximately $250, with Yumi targeting a 14% default-adjusted annual percentage rate across its consumer BNPL portfolio.

B2B Trade Credit: This product targets small-to-medium enterprise commerce, enabling suppliers to offer net-30 or net-60 invoice payment terms while receiving full payment immediately. Yumi underwrites the buyer, assumes default risk, and manages collections. The fee structure for this product sits at 2–5% commission on invoice amounts, charged only when the BNPL option is used. Buyers can split payments, with an optional settlement option on day 15 of a 30-day cycle.

All three products are designed so that the partner platform earns a new revenue stream without building infrastructure, while Yumi captures the underwriting margin and manages the operational complexity.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Yumi Finance's architecture is natively suited to Solana's infrastructure. Stablecoin settlement — primarily USDC — provides the payment rails that make cross-border credit viable at low cost and high throughput. Solana's transaction finality and fees make it practical to settle individual consumer BNPL transactions onchain in a way that would be economically unworkable on higher-fee blockchains.

The project's relationship with [[PROJECT:925]] is more than financial — it signals deep ecosystem alignment. Colosseum's Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon, held in December 2025 with over 9,000 participants submitting 1,576 projects, selected Yumi Finance as the first-prize winner in the DeFi category, awarding $25,000 in USDC for their onchain BNPL solution covering underwriting through loan origination. From there, Yumi was accepted into Colosseum Accelerator Cohort 4, one of just 11 startups chosen from 1,640 total submissions — a roughly 0.67% acceptance rate. The eight-week accelerator program, which includes time at Colosseum's San Francisco office, is designed to take projects from development stage to mainnet deployment.

Team and Backing

Yumi Finance operates as Yumi Labs Inc., incorporated in Panama, and is led by Mikhail ([email protected]), who serves as the primary contact and public face of the project. The core team also includes a co-founder operating under the handle CosmicDude.

The project's pre-seed round, announced in early 2025, was led by [[PROJECT:925]] and included notable angel investors: Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Avalanche; Arnold Lee; Fedor Chmilevfa; and a broader set of Web3 builders with backgrounds spanning Ether.Fi, the Ethereum Foundation, Resolv, GMX, Fluent, and Sphere. The presence of cross-chain investors alongside Solana-native backers reflects Yumi's positioning as infrastructure for the broader stablecoin credit market, not exclusively a Solana-only play.

Tokens and Governance

As of mid-2026, Yumi Finance has not announced a native token. The protocol operates as a B2B infrastructure business, with revenue flowing from partner commissions and interest margin rather than token issuance. No governance token, liquidity incentive program, or protocol-controlled treasury has been publicly disclosed.

Current Status

Yumi Finance's website and documentation are live and detailed, its Twitter account is actively publishing, and the project is progressing through the Colosseum accelerator pipeline toward mainnet deployment. The protocol's focus on credit infrastructure for existing fintech platforms — rather than building a standalone consumer DeFi product — gives it a differentiated go-to-market that bypasses the cold-start problem facing most new DeFi protocols. By embedding into platforms that already have users, Yumi Finance can scale credit underwriting volume without having to acquire end-user borrowers directly.

For a Solana ecosystem that has strong stablecoin infrastructure and fast, cheap settlement but relatively underdeveloped onchain credit markets, Yumi Finance represents a meaningful attempt to build the credit layer that has been missing from the stack.