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Key Takeaways
- Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale bought ANVL from the treasury, so the token’s supply did not expand, and terms were not disclosed.
- Anvil works like an on-chain letter of credit rather than a borrow-and-lend protocol, targeting businesses that need to guarantee payments.
- The protocol is small, with about $14 million in total value locked against roughly $56 billion across DeFi lending.
Founders Fund, the venture firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, led a $5 million purchase of governance tokens in Anvil, a decentralized finance protocol focused on using digital assets as collateral. The purchase comes as the project rolls out new tools aimed at bringing its technology to businesses and financial institutions beyond crypto-native users.
A Token Purchase From Existing Supply
Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also participated in the purchase of ANVL tokens, according to a Monday announcement.
The terms and valuation of the transaction were not disclosed. Anvil said the tokens involved came from its existing treasury holdings rather than being newly issued, meaning the purchase did not expand the token’s total supply.
ANVL has a circulating supply of 80 billion tokens out of a total supply of 100 billion. The tokens purchased by Founders Fund and the other investors carry governance rights, letting holders participate in decisions about the protocol’s future development.
Purchasing tokens from Anvil’s existing treasury rather than through a newly issued round is a structural choice that avoids diluting the token’s circulating supply at the time of the deal.
For a governance token, that distinction can matter to existing holders, since newly issued tokens would otherwise increase the total pool of tokens and proportionally reduce each existing holder’s share of voting power.
New Tools Aimed at Business Integration
Anvil, built on Ethereum, is designed to let digital assets serve as collateral for financial commitments, including payments and credit arrangements.
Anvil Research Labs, a research and development company building enterprise tools for the protocol, separately launched a software development kit intended to let companies integrate Anvil’s technology without writing blockchain code themselves, a step aimed at lowering the technical barrier for traditional businesses to adopt the protocol.
Anvil Research Labs named Consensys, Bitcoin.com, payments company Flexa and several other firms as partners already using or integrating its tools. Bullish, which participated in the token purchase, is separately exploring how the protocol could be used within its own operations.
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said in the announcement that the investment reflects demand for verifiable collateral in business transactions.
“Businesses need to know the commitments behind payments and credit will be honored.”
Krug added that Anvil lets companies secure those commitments using verifiable digital asset collateral, and that the new software development kit should make the protocol easier to integrate into existing business products.
A Different Approach Than Conventional DeFi Lending
Anvil is entering a segment of decentralized finance where using crypto as collateral is already common. DeFi lending protocols collectively hold about $56 billion in assets, according to DefiLlama data, with Aave and Morpho ranking among the largest platforms in that category.
Anvil, developed by the Acronym Foundation and built as fully open-source software, currently holds about $14 million in total value locked, making it small relative to those established lending platforms.
Anvil’s core product differs structurally from conventional DeFi lending. Rather than letting users deposit collateral to borrow against it, paying interest and risking liquidation if collateral values fall, Anvil functions more like an on-chain letter of credit: assets are set aside to guarantee a payment to another party and can be claimed if the underlying commitment is not met.
That structure does not require the party providing collateral to take out a loan or pay interest simply to create the guarantee, distinguishing it from the borrow-and-lend model that dominates most existing DeFi protocols.
The distinction positions Anvil toward a different customer base than typical DeFi lending platforms.
Where Aave and Morpho primarily serve users and institutions looking to borrow against crypto holdings or earn yield by supplying liquidity, Anvil’s letter-of-credit model targets businesses that need to guarantee a financial commitment without necessarily wanting to take on debt, a use case more closely aligned with traditional trade finance than with crypto-native borrowing and lending.
