Founders Fund leads $5 million ANVL token purchase in Anvil

Founders Fund leads a $5 million ANVL token purchase

Founders Fund, the venture firm backed by Peter Thiel, has led a $5 million purchase of governance tokens in Anvil. Governance tokens are crypto tokens that give holders a say in decisions about how a project is run. Anvil is a decentralized finance protocol built around using digital assets as collateral, meaning assets are pledged to back a financial promise.

Anvil said Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also took part in the purchase. Bullish is the parent company of CoinDesk.

Anvil told CoinDesk the tokens came from its existing treasury rather than being newly created. The terms and the valuation of the deal were not disclosed.

The numbers behind the token sale

• $5 million was the size of the token purchase led by Founders Fund.
• ANVL has a circulating supply of 80 billion tokens out of a total supply of 100 billion.
• Anvil is built on Ethereum, a blockchain that supports tokens and applications.
• Anvil has about $14 million in total value locked, which is the value of assets deposited in the protocol.
• DeFi lending platforms hold about $56 billion of assets, according to DefiLlama, with Aave and Morpho among the largest.

A developer kit meant to skip blockchain code

Anvil Research Labs, a research and development company that builds enterprise tools for the protocol, launched a software development kit. A software development kit is a set of tools that developers use to add a technology to their own products. Anvil said the kit will let companies integrate the protocol without writing blockchain code.

Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said businesses need to know the commitments behind payments and credit will be honored. He said Anvil lets them secure those commitments with verifiable digital asset collateral, and that the new kit makes it easier to integrate into their products.

The ANVL tokens give holders governance rights over the protocol, allowing them to take part in decisions about its development.

Companies named as partners

Anvil Research Labs named Consensus, Bitcoin.com, payments company Flexa and several other companies as partners that are already using or integrating its tooling. Bullish, which trades under the ticker BLSH, said it is working with Anvil to explore how the protocol could be used in its operations.

How Anvil says its collateral model differs

Anvil was developed by the Acronym Foundation. It was bootstrapped and made fully open source, according to the report.

Conventional DeFi lenders generally let users deposit assets as collateral and borrow against them. Borrowers pay interest and may face liquidation, meaning their collateral can be sold off, if its value falls. Anvil instead uses collateral to guarantee a financial commitment without necessarily creating a loan. Its core product is described as an onchain version of a letter of credit, a payment guarantee used in trade.

What is confirmed

• Founders Fund led a $5 million purchase of ANVL tokens, with Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also participating.
• Anvil said the tokens came from its existing treasury, not from a new issue.
• Anvil Research Labs launched a software development kit for businesses and financial institutions.
• Bullish, the parent company of CoinDesk, is exploring uses of the protocol in its operations.
• The ANVL token has a circulating supply of 80 billion out of 100 billion total.
• Anvil has about $14 million in total value locked.

What is still unclear

The financial terms and the valuation of the token purchase have not been disclosed. It is also not clear how much each investor paid or how many tokens each received.

The supplied source material ends mid-sentence while describing Anvil's letter-of-credit product, so the full details of how that product works and how assets are reserved are not available here.

Why the size gap stands out

Anvil's roughly $14 million in total value locked is small next to the roughly $56 billion held across DeFi lending platforms tracked by DefiLlama. The investment and the new developer kit come as the project tries to bring its collateral technology to businesses and financial institutions, a group that the protocol says needs to know that payment and credit commitments will be honored.

Sources

• CoinDesk