Founders Fund, the venture firm backed by Peter Thiel, led a $5 million purchase of ANVL governance tokens in Anvil, a decentralized finance protocol focused on digital-asset collateral. The transaction was announced as Anvil introduced new software aimed at making its infrastructure easier for businesses and financial institutions to use.
Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also took part in the ANVL purchase, according to a Monday announcement. The companies did not disclose the terms of the transaction or the valuation tied to it. Anvil told CoinDesk that the tokens sold in the deal came from the project’s existing treasury, not from a new issuance.
The ANVL token gives holders governance rights over the protocol, including a voice in decisions related to future development. Anvil said the token currently has a circulating supply of 80 billion, against a total supply of 100 billion.
Anvil adds an SDK for enterprise use
Anvil is built on Ethereum and is designed to let digital assets serve as collateral for financial commitments tied to payments and credit. Alongside the token purchase, Anvil Research Labs, the research and development company building enterprise tools for the protocol, launched a software development kit, or SDK.
The company said the SDK is intended to let businesses and financial institutions integrate Anvil’s digital-asset collateral technology without having to write blockchain code. The release is part of Anvil’s effort to move its tools beyond crypto-native users and into more conventional business workflows.
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said in the announcement that businesses need confidence that commitments behind payments and credit will be fulfilled. “Businesses need to know the commitments behind payments and credit will be honored,” Krug said. “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 said Consensus, Bitcoin.com, payments company Flexa and several other companies are already using or integrating its tooling. Bullish (BLSH), CoinDesk’s parent company, is also working with Anvil to examine how the protocol could be used in its own operations.
A collateral model that differs from standard DeFi lending
Anvil is entering a corner of decentralized finance where crypto collateral is already widely used. DefiLlama data shows DeFi lending protocols currently hold about $56 billion in assets, with Aave and Morpho among the largest platforms in that market.
Still, Anvil is trying to apply collateral in a different way. The protocol was developed by the Acronym Foundation, bootstrapped, and made fully open source. It currently has about $14 million in total value locked on its network, leaving it relatively small compared with established DeFi lending venues.
Conventional DeFi lenders usually let users deposit assets as collateral and then borrow against them. In that setup, borrowers pay interest and may face liquidation if the value of their collateral declines.
Anvil’s structure is different. Rather than using collateral primarily to support a loan, the protocol is designed to use it to guarantee a financial commitment without necessarily creating debt. CoinDesk Research described the core product as an onchain version of a letter of credit: assets are set aside to guarantee payment to another party, and those assets can be claimed if the commitment is not met.
Under that arrangement, the party posting collateral does not need to borrow funds or pay interest simply to create the guarantee. That puts Anvil in a different category from standard crypto lending even though both models rely on digital assets as collateral.