After examining Huma's team, I finally understand why KOLs are getting involved in this project...
I took a look at the core team members on LinkedIn one by one and couldn't help but marvel at the strength of the team and their backgrounds.
➤ Co-founder - Erbil Karaman - USA
Rich entrepreneurial and management experience. Former product, consumer, and operations lead at Lyft, the second-largest ride-sharing company in the US, and founding product lead for Facebook's major innovation projects... He also co-holds a technology patent related to social networking services with two others... Such a polymath is indeed suitable for the field of Web3 finance + technology. Only someone like this would have the willingness and ability to pursue innovative projects like Huma.
➤ Co-founder - Richard Liu - USA
A science and engineering expert, a technical manager, formerly an engineering manager at Oracle, Google, and Facebook, and CTO of the fintech company Earnin. This is Huma on LinkedIn.
➤ Marketing Director - Ejiro Oviri - from the UAE
Has experience in copywriting, content management, brand planning, and brand marketing. Formerly the brand, content, and public relations lead at Binance... It's no wonder he can embrace Kaito and get a crowd of Yappers eager to spread the word about Huma.
➤ Business and Operations Director - Jaou Toure - USA
With a background as an investment and venture capital researcher, a strategy and business operations expert, and a former senior project manager at McKinsey... Jaou Toure is probably quite adept at managing Huma's PayFi business.
➤ Community Management - Alex Goh - Malaysia
Formerly managed social media marketing at Alibaba.
➤ Product Design - Ryan Du - Canada
User experience and product expert.
➤ Country Head - Aziz Can Karakoç - Turkey
His LinkedIn introduction states he is a blockchain and artificial intelligence software engineer and researcher, and his educational background is indeed related to software engineering. However, he has relatively little work experience (from December 2021 to now), including roles as a Gamefi and Metaverse researcher, data science, social media management, and regional management. The country head is a senior management position responsible for business in a specific country or region, so this team member's contribution to Huma may not be technical.
➤ CBO - Patrick F. Campos - UAE
A former soccer coach turned strategic expert in the fintech field. The seemingly unrelated experience is actually not weakly correlated; the strategy on the soccer field is not simple. Having a strategic expert as Chief Business Officer is very necessary for Huma.
Patrick F. Campos is currently a strategic advisor at Arf.
❚ Merger of Arf and Huma
Key point: Arf is a globally regulated liquidity and settlement platform by Switzerland, designed for licensed financial institutions in the cross-border payment sector.
Arf's investment institutions include Circle Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), United Overseas Bank (UOB) Venture Management, Fenbushi Capital, Signum Capital, and others.
Since 2022, #Arf has provided over $830 million in USDC loans to financial institutions.
Initially, Arf was an important partner of Huma, and by 2024, Arf and Huma have already collaborated.
The functions of Huma's products include tokenizing cross-border payment orders and using them as collateral for lending, with loans, repayments, and accounts receivable on-chain. The feasibility of these operations is closely tied to Arf.
➤ Board Observer - Jerry X - USA
Jerry X also serves as a board observer for several projects or companies. A board observer is a role that provides advice without voting rights. Jerry X offers reference opinions to these projects and businesses based on his extensive research and investment experience in stocks and cryptocurrencies. Jerry X was one of the founding managers at GIC (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation) subsidiary Kepler Fi, responsible for management and execution. He is currently a member of the Stellar ($XLM) Foundation.
❚ Support from the Stellar Foundation for Huma
#Stellar Foundation has provided support that enabled Arf and Huma to collaborate on real-world asset tokenization and #Circle's #USDC liquidity on demand solution (which should provide an appropriate amount of USDC as needed).
➤ In Conclusion
The Huma team has several key characteristics:
First, there is a mix of black, yellow, and white (not ranked in any order). I don't know if it's for political correctness, but I have to add 'not ranked in any order'.
Second, the personnel distribution is mainly in the USA and UAE, with additional members from Canada, Singapore, and Malaysia. Basically, these are all mainstream areas for Web3.
Third, the team members are almost all elites from major Web2 companies, and while there are also Web3 practitioners, the Web3 members might be slightly fewer compared to other Web3 projects. However, several of these Web2 elites have noted their interest in Web3 fields like DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, etc., on LinkedIn. I believe more and more Web2 practitioners will become interested in Web3, and there will not be a particularly clear boundary between Web2 and Web3 in the future.
Fourth, except for one relatively young team member, almost all core team members of Huma have resumes and characteristics that are very suitable for their functional roles in Huma. Fully leveraging their personal advantages is beneficial for Huma's growth.
Fifth, the roles of team members include marketing, product, business, community, and business (strategy), giving Huma a significant advantage in operations and promotion. However, there are relatively few technical members, almost only one co-founder. I also haven't found Huma's open-source code repository yet. Although previous research on Huma's audit reports and bug bounty programs showed a certain level of security, it seems that Huma still has room for improvement in terms of technology and security.
Sixth, based on the resumes and backgrounds of team members, Huma's merger with Arf and its on-chain cross-border payment business, as well as the on-chain financial products derived from payments #payfi, have received support and collaboration from the Stellar Foundation and Circle (USDC), indicating promising prospects for the business.