What is PayFi?

PayFi, short for Payment Finance, is an emerging crypto-finance paradigm that aims to deeply integrate payment functions and financial services through blockchain technology, reshaping the underlying logic of value transfer and financial transactions. Unlike traditional finance, which focuses on “transactional behavior,” PayFi pays more attention to the Time Value of Money (TVM) during the “sending, receiving, and settlement” processes of crypto assets. Its core lies in building on-chain financial primitives centered on value flow, covering multiple scenarios such as payments, lending, wealth management, and cross-border transfers.
The concept of PayFi was first introduced by Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu at the EthCC conference in July 2024. She proposed a redesign of financial products and user experience centered around TVM to break the boundaries of Web2-era payment logic. Compared with traditional payment systems, PayFi significantly improves capital settlement efficiency through on-chain automation, decentralized trust mechanisms, and low-cost structures. It also provides a technical foundation for creating highly integrated financial product ecosystems, holding the potential to promote financial inclusion and optimize global value flows.

PayFi, short for ‘Payment Finance’ (image source: https://www.gate.io/en/learn/articles/what-is-pay-fi）

Key Elements of PayFi

The Time Value of Money (TVM) is one of the core design principles of PayFi. The platform encourages users to lock a certain amount of principal and use the interest earnings to cover daily expenses. For example, a user can deposit $50 into a DeFi lending platform, and once the accumulated interest is enough to pay for a $5 cup of coffee, the consumption can be completed at “zero cost” without touching the principal, thus improving capital utilization efficiency.
Secondly, smart contract automation is the key tool enabling PayFi to eliminate intermediaries—by presetting contract conditions, the system can automatically execute financial operations such as payments, profit sharing, and settlements without manual intervention, greatly reducing operational costs.
Finally, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization grants PayFi the ability to extend into the physical economy. For instance, by mapping traditional assets like real estate and accounts receivable onto the blockchain in digital form, PayFi facilitates global capital flows and cross-border payments. This not only enhances the liquidity of physical assets but also provides institutions and individual investors with diversified on-chain financial products.

Application Scenarios of PayFi

PayFi is fostering a range of innovative financial application scenarios and reshaping traditional logic for payments and financing. One of the most representative models is the “Buy Now, Pay Never” mechanism—users can allocate a certain amount of capital to yield-generating on-chain protocols, and the generated interest is immediately used for everyday expenses, thereby linking on-chain yields to real-world spending.
In addition, PayFi shows broad potential in the creator economy. For example, content creators can gradually unlock advertising revenue based on real-time metrics such as video views, thereby enhancing monetization efficiency. PayFi can also be applied in invoice financing, risk management, and optimization of payment settlement flows, supporting global private credit pool systems built on high-performance blockchains such as Solana, enabling diverse financing paths.

PayFi allows borrowers to defer payment for purchased items (Image source:https://news.qq.com/rain)

Key Players in the PayFi Sector

1. Huma

Huma Finance is a DeFi platform focused on real-world financial scenarios. It is committed to introducing blockchain technology into corporate financing and payment, creating on-chain solutions for income-backed loans and payment financing. As a pioneer in the PayFi (Payment Finance) sector, Huma Finance is building open, borderless financial infrastructure to help businesses and individuals maximize real-time capital flow and usage efficiency.
Huma’s core product is the On-Chain Factoring Market, allowing enterprises to use future income or accounts receivable as collateral to access funding directly from decentralized financial networks. This model effectively alleviates cash flow pressures commonly faced by SMEs. By tokenizing accounts receivable as on-chain assets, the financing process becomes more efficient and automated.

Huma Finance (Image Source:https://huma.finance/)

2. PolyFlow

PolyFlow is a blockchain infrastructure solution tailored for PayFi scenarios. It aims to reshape the compliance and efficiency structure of traditional payment systems by integrating DeFi with real-world asset systems. The platform focuses on resolving key issues such as compliance barriers, scalability limitations, and lack of transparency in current payment networks, with the goal of building a unified financial circulation system compatible with both TradFi and DeFi.
PolyFlow’s overall strategy is to decouple information flow and capital flow, reconstructing the underlying logic of payment finance in a modular manner. This provides greater operational flexibility and system compatibility for various participants. With its robust technical architecture and compliance-oriented approach, PolyFlow is becoming a key infrastructure for the PayFi ecosystem, driving the standardization and globalization of the next-generation payment finance network.

PolyFlow (Image Source:https://polyflow.medium.com/introducing-polyflow-apayfi)

PayFi Market Performance

PayFi has experienced a continuous downward trend from its peak (around $0.000021), falling to approximately $0.000012 at its lowest point—a cumulative decline of more than 40%. During this period, trading volume also shrank, indicating weakening investor confidence, and the current market is in a cleansing phase. Starting from April 9, PayFi began a strong rebound, recording several consecutive bullish candles, showing short-term capital inflows into the PayFi sector.
As of April 22, when this article was written, the candlestick chart shows a narrow-range consolidation pattern, indicating a temporary balance between bulls and bears. If it fails to break through the $0.0000165–$0.000017 range in the coming days, the market may test the support zone below $0.00001400.
From a macro perspective, PayFi, as a narrative-driven asset in the “payment finance” sector, has price fluctuations that are highly dependent on the progress of on-chain application adoption. Investors are advised to closely monitor developments in ecosystem integration and RWA support to assess the effectiveness of long-term value support.

3/22-4/22 PayFi Price Market Performance (Chart Source: PAYFI/SOL - PayFi Price on Raydium | GeckoTerminal)

Conclusion

The rise of PayFi signifies that payment finance is entering a new blockchain era marked by greater coordination and programmability—from refined capital value management and smart contract-driven transaction execution to the on-chain mapping of real-world assets. PayFi is redefining how traditional finance approaches “payment” and “financing.” Although the current ecosystem is still in its early stages and market performance remains volatile, with technological maturation and infrastructure improvement, PayFi is poised to become a new engine driving financial inclusion and value interconnection. The future market potential is well worth sustained attention.