Payment Financing (PayFi) network company Huma announced it has raised $38 million in funding. Distributed Global led the equity round, with significant participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, the Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures, CVC arm of İşbank, the largest private bank in Turkiye. Part of this rise came as investments into high-yield real-world assets (RWA) assets on the platform.
The vast majority of businesses and people worldwide depend on some form of payment financing, with credit cards and trade financing facilitating trillions in payments. Many families also depend on remittances (money sent back home across the borders).
Even though the demand for payment financing increases daily, it is creating an urgent need for more innovative solutions as traditional financial institutions are unable or unwilling to meet this need, widening the liquidity gap each day.
PayFi aims to fill this giant liquidity gap by bringing trillions of dollars of real-world payment volume over to blockchains and stablecoins. Utilizing the core strengths of blockchain—global money movement in seconds through programmable money—PayFi also enables new real-world use cases that were previously impossible. Huma has built the first-ever PayFi network with all of these use cases in mind, adopting an open, modular, and decentralized approach to empower interoperable solutions across participants. By bringing the best of RWA, Payments, and DeFi together, Huma is creating a network that is far more efficient and accessible than traditional alternatives.
Back in April, Huma merged with Arf, the leading on-demand liquidity solution for global payments. This brought together the two of the most prominent PayFi players. And Huma and Arf have already surpassed $1.8 billion in payment financing transactions and are on track to reach $10 billion next year, making them one of the fastest growing use cases for Circle’s USDC.
Part of this funding came as investments into Arf’s high-yield RWA assets. And The Stellar Development Foundation provided a $10 million investment. Plus, tokenized assets are currently available to accredited investors on Scroll for a limited period. With this funding round, Huma plans to further expand its PayFi network to the Stellar smart contract platform and to Solana in the coming months, making sure the network is accessible from all the major payments-focused chains.
Huma plans to launch the Huma Foundation this year, which is a major move to decentralize its PayFi network and broaden global access, further solidifying its leadership in the RWA space. And Huma is set to host the inaugural PayFi Summit in collaboration with the Solana Foundation and Stellar Development Foundation at Singapore Token 2049 on September 17th——an event poised to ignite conversations and drive innovation in the industry.
KEY QUOTES:
“While designing Huma, we often asked ourselves: How do you build an open payment financing network on blockchain that is more powerful than Visa? Today, stablecoins are already powering $2 trillion in payments annually. An open payment financing network is going to help grow the entire payment ecosystem faster. The surge of interest we’re seeing right now is a testament to PayFi’s potential. As more partners join us every week, it’s clear that PayFi is quickly becoming the new frontier of RWA.”
-Huma co-founder Richard Liu
“Moving money quickly and cheaply across borders is at the core of what the Stellar network does best. PayFi is providing real world utility that solves problems for people and companies, and it is the type of project tailor-made for the Stellar network. We look forward to continuing to working with Huma to grow the PayFi ecosystem.”
-Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation
“Huma’s PayFi network represents an important step forward in payment financing, offering solutions to long-standing inefficiencies in the industry. We believe innovations like this are crucial for addressing real-world challenges, and we’re pleased to see Huma playing a key role in advancing the Web3 space.”
-Chao Deng, CEO of HashKey Capital
“PayFi is the creation of new financial markets around the time value of money. On-chain finance can enable new financial primitives, product experiences, and financial access that are impossible in traditional or even Web2 finance. When I met the Huma team, it was immediately apparent that they’d be a great anchor for the PayFi ecosystem within Solana.”
-Lily Liu, President of Solana Foundation
