Founders Fund leads $5 million token purchase in Anvil protocol

Founders Fund, the venture firm backed by Peter Thiel, has led a $5 million token purchase in Anvil, a crypto collateral protocol, according to CoinDesk.

The deal is not a classic equity round. It is a token buy, which puts one of Silicon Valley’s best-known firms directly into a DeFi protocol’s governance asset.

What Anvil actually does

Anvil operates on Ethereum using a structure called an on-chain letter of credit. In traditional finance, a letter of credit is a promise, usually from a bank, that a payment will be made if certain conditions are met.

Anvil swaps the bank for smart contracts. Users lock collateral, mainly ETH or USDC, into vaults. That locked collateral then backs guarantees that are programmable and designed to resist default. No intermediary is needed to vouch for anyone.

The protocol is built to avoid loans, interest payments, and handing custody of assets to a third party. Anvil also charges no fees at the protocol level.

The numbers behind the protocol

Anvil launched in January 2025. It started as a bootstrapped, open-source project from the Acronym Foundation.

Its total value locked currently stands at around $10 million. That figure peaked at nearly $109 million in July 2025.

Governance runs through the ANVL token. The total supply is 100 billion tokens, with a circulating supply of roughly 80 to 88 billion. Roughly 60% of ANVL has been allocated to partners and community members.

Recent governance activity expanded the list of accepted collateral to include EURC, cbBTC, sUSDe, WBTC, and wstETH.

On the security side, Anvil has been audited by OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits. It has also run two bug bounty programs through Immunefi.

The founder and the backstory

Anvil was founded by Tyler Spalding, who previously co-founded the crypto payments venture Flexa.

Spalding has argued that Anvil’s structure produces verifiable guarantees without the default risk found in traditional arrangements. He has framed the design as relevant to both DeFi and conventional finance.

What this means

The most immediate signal is about structure, not size. A $5 million check is modest by venture standards, but buying tokens directly ties the investor’s outcome to the governance asset itself. That aligns Founders Fund with ANVL holders in a way an equity stake in a development company would not. It also means the firm has skin in protocol governance decisions, such as which collateral types get added next.

The TVL picture is the obvious tension. A protocol sitting at around $10 million, down from nearly $109 million, still has to prove that demand for on-chain guarantees can grow and stick.

The risks are worth naming plainly. Collateral like wrapped Bitcoin and synthetic dollars carries smart contract, custody, and peg risk, and a guarantee backed by a depegged asset is weaker than it looks on paper.

With most of the 100 billion ANVL already circulating, future dilution is less of a question than whether real usage can give the token a reason to exist beyond voting.