What are the "PayFi-like" projects?
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What are the "PayFi-like" projects?
Buy Now, Pay Never.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Wu Tianyi, DeThings
"Buy Now, Pay Never" might be the most representative slogan of PayFi—referring to using cryptocurrency and leveraging interest from lending platforms to cover consumption expenses. This concept was first introduced by Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, at the ABS Asia Blockchain Summit, where she also outlined the concrete framework of PayFi.
Creatives could pre-finance future income to fund their next project—a scenario difficult to achieve in traditional finance. Companies can rapidly access cash flow from receivables via cryptocurrency, reducing waiting periods. This represents a massive market opportunity.
While fast payments and low transaction costs are important within this innovative PayFi concept, the more critical aspect is that technology should enable use cases with 10x utility. "Solana’s advantages in high performance, capital mobility, and talent mobility make it the only blockchain capable of delivering such utility," said Lily Liu.
The Potential of PayFi
If we look back over the past few decades, growth in payment ecosystems has largely been driven by financing mechanisms. For example, credit cards support $16 trillion in merchant payments annually, exemplifying how financing drives widespread adoption and utility. Trade finance facilitates $10 trillion in B2B payments each year, highlighting its critical role in global commerce. $4 trillion in prepaid funds supports remittances and global settlements—today, one in every six households relies on remittances for payment.
From a cryptocurrency perspective, without payment use cases, the crypto market faces liquidity shortages. Similarly, without financing, the utility and adoption of internet-native money would also be constrained. PayFi may exist precisely to overcome these limitations.
As a fusion of Web3 payments and DeFi, PayFi first embodies the time value of money—the idea that money's value changes over time, with present money being worth more than future money due to inflation and potential investment returns.
Secondly, through the logic of real-world asset tokenization (RWA), PayFi tokenizes payment scenarios and business processes, moving them on-chain to capture the time value of money in real-world payment contexts. This innovation not only realizes the vision set forth in the Bitcoin whitepaper—peer-to-peer electronic cash payments without trusted third parties—but also leverages stablecoins as both medium of exchange and unit of account, ultimately enabling efficient, fast global payments on high-performance blockchain networks.
PayFi encompasses diverse business models, including payment tokens themselves, RWA-based payment financing, DeFi-integrated Web3 payment innovations, and migrating traditional payment logic onto the blockchain. Among these, tokenized U.S. Treasuries—as a key PayFi application—have already demonstrated significant market potential, with market size continuously growing.
Beyond serving as a payment medium, PayFi can also provide additional capital efficiency, utility, and composability within DeFi environments. For instance, using the PayFi RWA financing model, funds from DeFi lending can fulfill real-world payment needs, bringing payment financing yields on-chain. This model has the potential to bring trillions of dollars in payment volume on-chain, better optimizing the time value of money and accelerating stablecoin adoption.
What Are "PayFi-like" Projects Doing?
As an emerging concept, no project today fully embodies the essence of PayFi. However, several projects are beginning to reflect early prototypes, offering glimpses into its future.
Rain.Fi provides settlement liquidity for enterprise cards backed by USDC. Corporate funds pledge assets into vaults, which assign credit limits and automatically settle balances on-chain at the end of each settlement period. An increasing number of companies are innovating in the card payments space using digital assets.
Rain.Fi enables collateralized purchases or buy-now-pay-later functionality, allowing users to acquire high-value NFTs by paying only a small upfront cost, with the remainder borrowed. As a peer-to-peer lending platform using digital assets as collateral, Rain.Fi significantly improves liquidity efficiency, accessibility, composability, and transparency.
Arf is transforming cross-border payments by providing financial institutions with on-chain liquidity solutions. The platform enables 24/7 instant, transparent, and low-cost USDC-based settlements, eliminating the need for globally pre-funded nostro accounts. Cross-border payment financing offers extremely high capital efficiency and scalability. Arf recently surpassed $1.6 billion in on-chain transaction volume, making it one of the fastest-growing stablecoin use cases.
In addition, BSOS combines enterprise resource planning platforms with on-chain liquidity to create supply chain real-world assets, offering short-term financing options even for small funding amounts. Zeebu enables global telecom operators to exchange roaming invoices and settle them on-chain.
From these similar projects, we can glimpse PayFi’s future possibilities: bringing trillions of dollars in payment volume on-chain to better optimize the time value of money; delivering sustainable, risk-adjusted yields ranging from single-digit risk-free returns to attractive double-digit private credit yields; scaling rapidly with minimal systemic risk; and, thanks to the short-term nature of underlying assets in payment financing transactions, offering high liquidity when properly structured.
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