Note at the beginning:
Since its full online launch on May 26, HUMA has dropped from a high of 0.1 since the ALPHA airdrop, and its current market cap has fallen below 100 million, with an FDV of 600 million. Many discussions on Twitter suggest that its model necessitates selling pressure. Honestly, I think this is too simplistic; a payment project has many ways to monetize. The main reasons for the decline are still related to the handling of airdrops and market support, and only then to the return of value. So, how much $HUMA represents a return to value? What is this project doing to make money? Today, we will study this in detail.
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Main text:
PayFi started with stablecoins, OTC, and U-cards, which is a major proposition. A friend showed me in 2021 how to order takeout with U-cards on Meituan. Now, OKX has directly created a PAY interface to send red packets for social payments. Research reports estimate that the global payment financing market is worth $30 trillion, including $16 trillion in credit card merchant payments, $10 trillion in trade financing, and cross-border remittance markets. This scale dwarfs the total market cap of cryptocurrencies, and even a small share would be significant, but truly successful payment ventures are all colossal entities. With such a large narrative, it needs a correspondingly large vision. Now, considering HUMA's opening FDV of $1 billion, doesn’t that feel quite reasonable?
1. Introduction to the Huma Finance project
1. What is it? Introduction to Huma Finance
Huma Finance is the world's first decentralized PayFi network, committed to innovating global payment and financing methods through blockchain technology. It combines the low-cost, high-throughput characteristics of high-performance blockchains such as Solana and Stellar with the stability of stablecoins like USDC and PYUSD to create an efficient and secure ecosystem. HUMA's core products include the PayFi network (payment financing), Arf (cross-border payment liquidity), Raincard (Web3 corporate card), BSOS (trade financing), and Zeebu (telecom payments). These products provide innovative financial tools for enterprises and individuals, helping them bypass traditional bank limitations to quickly obtain liquidity and credit.
Note the key point here: bypassing traditional bank restrictions, as well as the cross-border payment solution Arf, which is very important for ordinary people and represents a major aspect of this project.
2. What can it do? What problem does HUMA solve?
The global payment financing market is vast but has significant pain points:
High fees: Traditional cross-border payments (like SWIFT) have exorbitant fees and settlement cycles of several days.
Liquidity bottlenecks: Small and medium-sized enterprises find it difficult to obtain working capital due to strict bank loan requirements or prepayment needs.
Insufficient transparency: Trade financing and cross-border payment processes are opaque and inefficient.
Financial exclusion: Billions of people globally are unbanked or underbanked and cannot access credit.
HUMA's solutions include:
Blockchain empowerment: Utilizing Solana's high throughput (each transaction costs $0.00025, with a 400 millisecond settlement) to achieve fast, low-cost transactions.
Stablecoin application: Ensuring price stability and compliance through USDC and PYUSD, supporting instant settlements.
Decentralized financing: The PayFi network allows users to pledge future income or RWA to quickly obtain liquidity.
Global coverage: Products like Arf eliminate the prepayment requirement for cross-border payments, reducing costs and accelerating settlements.
3. Can it take center stage? The significance of PayFi and HUMA's blockchain ecological position
PayFi is an emerging concept jointly defined by HUMA and the Solana Foundation, referring to using blockchain to optimize payment financing models. Unlike traditional DeFi's speculative nature (like liquidity mining or leveraged trading), PayFi focuses on real-world financial needs, such as accounts receivable financing, cross-border remittances, and corporate credit. HUMA's PayFi network elevates the efficiency and transparency of traditional finance to a new level through smart contracts and stablecoins.
In the blockchain ecosystem, HUMA's positioning is as a pioneer of PayFi, building a bridge between DeFi and traditional finance through partnerships with top players like Solana, Circle, and Fireblocks. It has processed over $2 billion in transaction volume with no defaults, demonstrating its execution capability in the RWA (real-world assets) space. As RWA tokenization becomes a hot topic in blockchain, HUMA, with its focus on payment financing and support from Solana's infrastructure, has become a leader in this race.
In other words, currently, solely from the perspective of the high-performance chain SOLANA, the only (official) choice for PayFi is HUMA.
4. How to use it? Financial application scenarios of HUMA
HUMA's core business is a complete payment financing network and application ecosystem, with each component providing solutions for different scenarios:
Huma Protocol (core payment financing network): HUMA's on-chain protocol provides a stablecoin lending market. Borrowers (such as cross-border payment companies, enterprises, and cardholding merchants) use future income or accounts receivable as collateral to obtain USDC/USDT loans; liquidity providers (LPs) deposit stablecoins to earn fixed returns. The protocol automates the lending and repayment processes, ensuring transparency in capital flow and yield distribution. Reportedly, since the launch of HUMA 2.0, over $53.4 million in stablecoins have been deposited into the protocol, creating double-digit annualized yields (LPs can obtain 10%+ APY). HUMA Institutional provides customized products for institutional investors that meet regulatory requirements, allowing participation in specific pools with high credit ratings (e.g., the Arf pool operated by HUMA).
Arf (cross-border payment financing): Arf is a payment institution registered in Switzerland, holding FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority) regulatory licenses, providing short-term liquidity loans based on stablecoins for global payment institutions. Through Arf, traditional cross-border payment companies no longer need to pre-deposit large amounts of funds to achieve real-time settlements 24/7. Both Circle and Fireblocks have pointed out that the launch of the Arf platform has significantly reduced the costs and risks of cross-border payments. So far, Arf has facilitated over $1.6 billion in on-chain transactions without any defaults.
Raincard (digital asset corporate card): Raincard provides a corporate credit card solution backed by USDC. Corporate finance can pledge a certain amount of stablecoins on-chain to obtain corresponding credit limits, and monthly bills are settled automatically. This means that card transactions can be settled in real time—no longer waiting several days for traditional card merchants to receive payments, significantly improving company cash flow.
BSOS (supply chain finance solution): BSOS focuses on supply chain trade financing by integrating ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems with the HUMA platform, putting invoices and other trade documents on-chain. In traditional supply chains, small financing often involves cumbersome procedures and high thresholds. BSOS's solution allows SMEs in the supply chain to obtain short-term funds using invoices as collateral, filling cash flow gaps and optimizing trade financing processes.
Zeebu (telecom roaming payments): Zeebu solves the problem of roaming bill settlements between global telecom operators. Traditional roaming settlements often require complex manual reconciliations and cross-border remittances, while Zeebu puts roaming bills on-chain, utilizing HUMA's financing network for instant settlement, improving efficiency and reducing disputes.
These products belong to the category of real-world asset (RWA) applications: HUMA has achieved on-chain financing of traditional financial assets (accounts receivable, invoices, notes, etc.), realizing the integration of on-chain funds and offline economies. Currently, HUMA's architecture can be expanded to more scenarios, such as high-speed settlement of government bonds, DePIN infrastructure financing, etc., bringing new liquidity channels to the entire crypto ecosystem. Most of this is achieved through HUMA's core and partner platforms; you can think of it as having no Taobao, but being Alipay, integrating functionalities through collaborations.
$HUMA is the native utility and governance token of the HUMA protocol, with a total issuance cap of 10 billion tokens, and the initial circulation is only about 17.33%.
The main functions of the token include: holders can gain governance voting rights through locking (the longer the lock-up period, the higher the voting weight), which is used to participate in decisions regarding protocol parameter adjustments, liquidity distribution, and incentive plans; meanwhile, $HUMA is used to incentivize ecosystem development, for example, the protocol will distribute HUMA rewards based on user contributions (such as deposit size and duration), and partners can also receive token incentives based on transaction volume or revenue metrics.
Regarding token distribution, the official has released a detailed mechanism: of the initial issuance of 10 billion tokens, 5% is set aside for airdrop rewards for early users and community contributors, 31% is for liquidity providers and ecological incentives; 7% is for supporting listings on centralized exchanges and marketing, 4% is reserved for market makers to maintain market liquidity, and 2% is for early private placements; investor holdings (seed round and round A) account for 20.6%, while the team and advisors account for 19.3%, with the remaining 11.1% deposited into the protocol treasury for future ecological construction and liquidity.
To prevent inflation from rising too quickly, $HUMA adopts a lock-up and linear release mechanism: the team and investors must first lock their tokens for 12 months, then release them quarterly over three years; LP and ecological incentives will be gradually distributed according to a "quarterly deflationary release" plan, and the community can adjust the release schedule through governance votes. Some analyses suggest that the protocol plans to use a portion of the fees paid by borrowers for buybacks and burning HUMA (initially about 50% of the fees), further reducing circulating supply and supporting token value.
2. Can $HUMA be bought? What should the expected price be?
1. Valuation analysis
From a valuation perspective, it can be inferred by combining the protocol's business scale and token circulation situation.
Using the price-to-sales method as an example, suppose the HUMA protocol's annual financing volume reaches the tens of billions level. Based on public data, the borrowing interest rate is around 6-10 basis points per day (approximately 0.06-0.10%), corresponding to an annual interest rate of roughly 24%.
If calculated based on a total transaction volume of $4.5 billion (assuming sustained utilization), the annual revenue scale could be in the billions (for example, $4.5 billion × 0.0008 × 365 ≈ $1.17 billion).
If valuing at a price-to-sales ratio of 10-15 times, the implied protocol market capitalization would be around $12-17.5 billion, corresponding to a total of 10 billion $HUMA tokens, with expected token prices in the range of $0.12-$0.18.
Of course, this is only a rough estimate; actual conditions need to consider factors such as fee sharing, operational costs, credit losses, etc. If a more conservative assumption is taken (like a price-to-sales ratio of 5-10 times), the price range may drop to around $0.05-$0.10. Based on the discounted cash flow (DCF) method, the net cash flow from fees in the coming years can be predicted and discounted. Currently, the industry generally adopts a discount rate of over 10%. If market penetration is slow, the valuation will also be lower.
In summary, analysts generally believe that the short-term reasonable price for $HUMA is around $0.05–$0.12 (corresponding to a market cap of about $500 million); if the ecosystem develops smoothly and institutional adoption increases, the long-term market cap could reach billions of dollars, with corresponding token prices potentially exceeding $0.20 or even higher.
It should be noted that the above valuations are merely theoretical estimates and rely on various assumptions. The actual value of $HUMA also comes from the use cases of the token itself: it serves as "financing fuel" in the HUMA protocol, and participating in collateral and governance can bring tangible benefits and power to holders. This intrinsic utility is also an important factor supporting the price. As protocol revenues and locked-up amounts grow, the future yield share represented by each HUMA token increases, which may also form positive support for the price.
This part is actually not my strong suit; I've looked at quite a few analyses before HUMA went live, and the lowest valuation suggested is $0.05. If viewed solely from a macro perspective, the current price is already at a relatively low position. However, analyzing purely from a macro perspective is not our style, so let's return to the on-chain view.
2. From the on-chain perspective, is there support?
Since $HUMA is deployed on both SOL and BSC, and balances through oracles on both sides, we analyze both sides.
At first glance, the number of on-chain holding addresses is actually not many, with 15,000 on SOL and only over 2,000 on BSC. This is related to its simultaneous airdrop on exchanges; purchases made on well-known exchanges like Binance and OKX can only count as one address on the respective hot wallets. Therefore, the number of potential investment addresses is not large.
Secondly, secondary liquidity far exceeds primary liquidity. Due to the significant market share occupied by exchanges, only one-thousandth of liquidity remains on-chain, which can easily distort data. Therefore, we only observe whether there are accumulation and support behaviors on-chain, while the more critical aspects should be analyzed at the level of spot and contract open interest.
Since the token launch, there have been two main liquidity providers, referred to as Brother No. 1 and Brother No. 2. Those who know how to play can check on-chain; I will mention that Binance will indicate an unknown contract address.
Among them, Brother No. 1 trades around $50,000 each time to make money from the bid-ask spread; Brother No. 2 is using real money to support SOL, but currently, Brother No. 2 has temporarily exited, and only Brother No. 1 has provided large liquidity, with others being retail investors increasing their positions, so the support here is relatively weak.
In the USDT trading pair pool, we see that liquidity around 0.076 reacts more violently, while other places are relatively thin. Given that HUMA is currently actively conducting on-chain trading activities, we directly combine this with K-line analysis.
3. From a K-line technical perspective
Although the K-line has only been online for 2 days, it is clearly in a downtrend, but the downward trend of the K-line is flattening. Considering the structural aspects of the contract, we also need to look at the open interest.
Since the contract went live, the current open interest has been increasing rapidly, with most of the additions being short positions. This is a very dangerous signal, as there are too many shorts. However, both the spot and on-chain liquidity are very low, which means that if the market makers choose to liquidate these shorts, it could lead to a very dangerous cascade of liquidations. Therefore, at this moment, I absolutely will not research shorting; instead, I will look for long positions or buying spot when a reversal structure presents itself.
The primary focus must be on the price reaction at the downtrend line. In conjunction with the current activities of the HUMA team participating in trading volume competitions, I would prefer to focus on the horizontal structure following a significant liquidation, which is the healthiest scenario for both trading volume and HUMA's K-line trend.
3. Combining fundamentals, on-chain data, K-line charts, the investment rationale for HUMA and potential risks
1. Investment rationale
① From a fundamental perspective, $HUMA has the following potential investment value:
Massive market space: The global cross-border payment, corporate trade financing, and credit card settlement markets are worth trillions (e.g., the annual credit card transaction volume is about $16 trillion). The PayFi model provides innovative solutions, which are expected to gradually capture a share of the traditional payment market. As more real assets (invoices, notes) are put on-chain, HUMA has the opportunity to become one of the core infrastructures of these fund flows.
The business model has been validated: HUMA has already been implemented in multiple scenarios. Reportedly, the Arf platform has completed over $1.6 billion in on-chain transactions without defaults, and LPs have achieved double-digit returns. HUMA 2.0 has had continuous deposits in the tens of thousands of dollars over the months since its launch, proving ordinary users' interest in such yield strategies (as evidenced by the 10.5% base interest rate attracting over 50,000 deposits). The team has also acquired Arf and connected with projects like Rain, BSOS, Zeebu, etc., continuously expanding the ecological landscape, all of which provide endorsement for the commercial value of the products.
Top-tier team and partners: The founding team members have backgrounds in commercializing products for Toyota, and the co-founder has led projects at GoogleFi, Facebook, etc.; the backers include the Solana Foundation, Goldman Sachs' Galaxy Digital, Fenbushi, ParaFi, etc. Strategic partners include industry leaders like Circle, Stellar, Kamino, Jupiter, etc., which help HUMA gain advantages in technology, compliance, and market promotion.
The token model is reasonable: $HUMA adopts a "revenue sharing + deflation" model: on one hand, token holders can earn growth returns and rewards by participating in protocol governance and providing liquidity; on the other hand, the protocol promises to use part of the fees for buybacks and burns, which helps to support the token's value from both demand and supply sides. Additionally, HUMA 2.0 has designed a dual model: ordinary staking earns yields (10.5% APY), and aggressive mode aims for airdrop points (Feathers), encouraging users to stake for the long term and contribute liquidity to the network.
Industry trend favorable: The current DeFi and cryptocurrency sectors are transitioning from simple trading and staking to expanding into "real-world assets." Central banks, Visa, PayPal, etc., have all begun to lay out stablecoins and digital payments, while RWA (such as government bonds, commercial paper) on-chain is also rapidly emerging. Against this backdrop, HUMA, as a leading "payment + financing" infrastructure, aligns with the trend of DeFi moving towards financial services and linking to the physical economy.
② From the on-chain and K-line technical perspective
On-chain liquidity is thin, with spot volatility much greater than contracts: on-chain liquidity accounts for only one-thousandth of the overall market cap, making it very easy to cause significant volatility even if distributed near the current price, while more market liquidity exists in contracts, with total contract holdings exceeding half of the market cap, which is very absurd. If a liquidation occurs, it could easily lead to high market control behavior.
The K-line is about to face support and resistance conversion: the current position has an upper resistance level of less than 1%, and the continuous increase of short positions has not caused the price to move downward. In other words, there are no more shorts to push down the price; unless the market makers want to sell here, the only direction left is upward.
2. Risk warnings
Regulatory risk: HUMA involves cross-border payments and stablecoin settlements, facing potential changes in financial regulatory rules from various countries in the future. If major stablecoins (like USDC) are restricted in certain jurisdictions, or if payment financial regulations tighten, it could impact business operations. Although HUMA has obtained compliance chips like the Swiss FINMA license through Arf, the global regulatory uncertainty remains a concern.
Market volatility: The price volatility and liquidity risk of the overall crypto asset market are unavoidable. If the overall market experiences a sharp decline, $HUMA may adjust in the short term. Additionally, since $HUMA is not yet circulating on major exchanges, its initial price may fluctuate significantly due to a small number of buy and sell orders.
Competitive risk: There are already several institutions/projects laid out in the payment financing and RWA sectors, such as Maple Finance, TrueFi, Goldfinch, etc., which have a certain market foundation in on-chain credit and note financing. If these projects accelerate innovation and capture market share, they may compress HUMA's growth space. Especially competitors targeting institutions and quality borrowers may compete with HUMA in the same niche market.
Execution and operational risk: HUMA's business model is built on rapid capital turnover and complex risk control. If the project does not execute well in the future (e.g., rising loan default rates, insufficient liquidity provision, changes in partnering institutions, technical security vulnerabilities, etc.), it could negatively impact the protocol's yield and reputation. The actual yield distribution mechanism and fee model of the protocol also need time to be tested.
Macroeconomic risk: Changes in global interest rates and economic conditions will also affect HUMA's business. For example, if central banks continue to lower interest rates, the demand for high-yield stablecoin products may decline, compressing financing spreads. Additionally, changes in digital asset regulation or monetary policy could indirectly affect the stablecoin market and cross-border payment volumes.
The above is a complete analysis of the HUMA Finance project
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