'First have money, then consume' seems to be an obvious rule. Even with the emergence of credit cards, installment payments, invoice financing, and other products, it essentially remains that banks and institutions advance funds for you, while relying on credit scores and collateral to mitigate risks.
But Huma Finance chose to directly subvert this logic - it transforms the originally Excel-predictable figure of 'future income' into an on-chain tradable, collateralizable, and financeable asset.
The financial model behind this is not a fanciful illusion, but a classic principle based on the time value of money (TVM): $100 today ≠ $100 tomorrow. Traditional institutions use it to calculate bond and loan pricing, while Huma moves it into smart contracts, automating cash flow pattern analysis, risk pricing, and lending with minimal manual intervention.
More critically, this is not a closed loop of Web2, but an open PayFi network. In this network, Huma Finance not only supports financing of real-world income such as salaries, invoices, and remittances, but can also seamlessly integrate with other DeFi protocols to form a brand new funding circulation model. For example:
A freelancer can use unpaid invoices as collateral to instantly receive 80% of the funds on-chain to participate in staking mining;
Cross-border e-commerce merchants can use upcoming foreign exchange income as collateral to advance payment for goods, locking in supply chain prices;
Even AI-driven Web3 platforms can directly turn content creators' future advertising shares into NFTs, freely trading in the market.
Compared to RWA lending protocols in the same field, such as Goldfinch and Maple Finance, which still lean towards institutional credit markets, Huma's differentiation lies in that it does not seek 'collateralized asset holders', but instead aims to unleash the on-chain credit of 'people with stable incomes'. The potential market for this model almost covers small and medium-sized enterprises, freelancers, and cross-border labor globally, with a market size far exceeding traditional crypto lending.
If the DeFi summer of 2020 allowed digital assets to truly 'make money' for the first time, then Huma Finance could potentially start a new credit revolution: allowing future cash flows to create value today, enabling ordinary people to have truly quantifiable and financeable credit assets on-chain for the first time.
In a reality where the economy is full of uncertainty and on-chain liquidity is increasingly tight, such a PayFi model not only has imagination but could also become the stronghold for the next wave of crypto capital flow.