Founders Fund, the venture firm associated with Peter Thiel, has invested $5 million into the Anvil protocol. Unlike traditional equity financing, this transaction involved a direct purchase of the project's governance tokens.
Anvil, which launched in January 2025, operates on Ethereum as a collateral protocol. It utilizes smart contracts to provide on-chain letters of credit, allowing users to lock assets like ETH or USDC into vaults to generate programmable guarantees without intermediaries.
The protocol was established by Tyler Spalding, a co-founder of the crypto payments firm Flexa. It originated as an open-source project under the Acronym Foundation and does not charge fees at the protocol level.
The total value locked in the protocol is currently approximately $10 million, having reached a peak of nearly $109 million in July 2025. The total supply of ANVL tokens is 100 billion, with 80 to 88 billion currently in circulation.
Anvil has undergone security audits by OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits and conducted two bug bounty programs via Immunefi. Recent governance decisions have expanded the range of accepted collateral to include assets such as EURC, cbBTC, sUSDe, WBTC, and wstETH.
