Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund has led a $5 million purchase of governance tokens in Anvil, a decentralized finance protocol focused on digital-asset collateral, as the project rolls out new tools aimed at bringing its technology to businesses and financial institutions. According to a Monday announcement, Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also participated in the purchase of ANVL tokens. The terms and valuation of the transaction were not disclosed, and Anvil confirmed the tokens came from its existing treasury rather than being newly issued. The protocol's governance token has a circulating supply of 80 billion tokens out of a total supply of 100 billion tokens.
Anvil Research Labs, a research and development company building enterprise tools for the protocol, launched a software development kit (SDK) that will allow companies to integrate Anvil without having to write blockchain code. As reported by CoinDesk, Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, stated that "Businesses need to know the commitments behind payments and credit will be honored. Anvil lets them secure those commitments with verifiable digital asset collateral, and the new SDK makes it easier to integrate into their products." Anvil Research Labs has secured partnerships with Consensus, Bitcoin.com, payments company Flexa and several other companies as partners that are already using or integrating its tooling, with Bullish also working with Anvil to explore how the protocol could be used in its operations.
Unlike conventional decentralized finance lenders, Anvil uses collateral to guarantee financial commitments without requiring the provider to take out a loan or pay interest. According to a CoinDesk Research report, the protocol's core product is an onchain version of a letter of credit: assets are reserved to guarantee payment to another party and can be claimed if the commitment isn't met. The arrangement doesn't require the collateral provider to borrow money or pay interest simply to create the guarantee. Anvil is entering a part of decentralized finance where putting crypto up as collateral is already commonplace, with DeFi lending protocols currently holding about $56 billion of assets, according to DefiLlama, with Aave and Morpho among the largest platforms.
The Anvil protocol, developed by the Acronym Foundation, was bootstrapped and made fully open source, currently having about $14 million in total value locked on its network. As reported by CoinDesk, this remains small compared with established DeFi lending platforms, but the protocol is designed to allow digital assets to be used as collateral for financial commitments, including payments and credit. The ANVL tokens purchased by Founders Fund and the other investors provide governance rights over the protocol, allowing holders to participate in decisions about its development. While DeFi lending protocols currently hold approximately $56 billion in assets, Anvil targets a distinct use case focused on business payment security rather than traditional borrowing.
