Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's venture firm, led a $5 million token purchase in Anvil, an Ethereum-based protocol that issues on-chain letters of credit, according to a CoinDesk report.

The transaction is structured as a direct token buy rather than a traditional equity round. That places the Silicon Valley firm into ANVL, the protocol's native governance asset, tying its outcome to the same token other ANVL holders use to steer protocol decisions.

How Anvil structures credit

Anvil's product replaces the bank-issued letter of credit with smart contracts. Users deposit collateral — primarily ETH and USDC, with EURC, cbBTC, sUSDe, WBTC, and wstETH added more recently — into vaults. That collateral backs programmable guarantees designed to resist default without an intermediary.

The design deliberately avoids loans, interest payments, and third-party custody. Anvil charges no fees at the protocol level.

Tyler Spalding, who founded Anvil and previously co-founded the crypto payments firm Flexa, has argued that the structure produces verifiable guarantees without the default risk found in traditional credit arrangements, and has framed the design as relevant to both DeFi and conventional finance.

The TVL question

Anvil launched in January 2025 from the Acronym Foundation as a bootstrapped, open-source project. Total value locked currently sits near $10 million, down from a July 2025 peak of nearly $109 million.

That drawdown frames the central operational challenge: whether demand for on-chain guarantees can stabilize and rebuild once the early depositor wave has rotated out.

Token economics and governance

• ANVL has a 100 billion total supply, with 80 to 88 billion tokens circulating.
• Roughly 60% of the supply was allocated to partners and community members.
• Recent governance votes expanded the accepted collateral list.
• The same governance mechanism decides fee policy, parameter changes, and treasury allocations.

With most of the supply already circulating, future dilution pressure is reduced compared with tokens earlier in their emission schedule. The token's standing instead hinges on whether real usage gives it a function beyond voting.

Security posture and collateral risk

OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits have audited Anvil. The protocol has run two bug bounty rounds through Immunefi.

Collateral risk remains distinct from code risk. Wrapped Bitcoin and synthetic dollar assets carry smart-contract, custody, and peg exposures. A guarantee backed by a depegged asset weakens on paper even when the underlying contracts operate as designed.

Why a token buy matters

A $5 million check is modest by venture standards. Buying ANVL directly aligns Founders Fund with token holders in a way an equity stake in a development company would not. The structure gives the firm voting power over protocol-level decisions, including which collateral types are added next, and places its outcome alongside existing ANVL holders as governance evolves.

The near-term test for Anvil is whether the protocol can rebuild TVL toward its July 2025 peak of nearly $109 million and demonstrate that on-chain, collateral-backed guarantees are a product institutions route meaningful volume through.