$Huma Finance Interview: How PayFi Connects Real-World Finance and DeFi

"Can blockchain truly serve real-world finance?" @humafinance co-founder Richard Liu @DrPayFi provides the answer with PayFi—a new on-chain financing model designed for cross-border payments and credit card cash advance scenarios.

Recently, PANews interviewed Richard. He previously served as a founding member of Google Fi and CTO of EarnIn, with extensive experience in "salary advance" financial services. In 2022, he founded $Huma, aiming to solve structural issues in traditional finance such as opacity in financing and liquidity bottlenecks through on-chain mechanisms.

Currently, $Huma focuses on two main directions: providing high-frequency, short-term advances for payment companies to tap into the $4 trillion cross-border payments market; and offering credit card prepayment financing, serving mature markets like the US, with potential far exceeding $16 trillion.

$Huma chose to build its clearing core layer on Solana, not only for its performance but also due to the engineering support and institutional resources provided by the foundation. To date, $Huma has raised $46 million and processed a total transaction volume of $4 billion.

Richard pointed out that $Huma introduces traditional financial risk control structures such as "first-loss guarantee + SPV隔离账户 (special purpose vehicle segregated accounts)," creating a compliant and transparent asset layer rarely seen in DeFi. In 2024, $Huma will launch $Huma 2.0, allowing retail investors to participate in real financing opportunities through two different modes.

He candidly admits that the biggest current challenge for PayFi is user education—DeFi users find it difficult to understand the logic of real interest spreads, while traditional finance professionals are unfamiliar with on-chain asset models. "We need to learn to speak two languages," he emphasizes. "Real-world implementation isn't about marketing; it's about connection."

$Huma's goal is not just to develop a product but to build an on-chain financial platform that brings real-world assets into the DeFi ecosystem, ultimately transforming the allocation of financial resources.