Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Bets $5 Million on This Crypto Protocol

TLDR

• Founders Fund led a $5 million purchase of ANVL governance tokens.
• Pantera Capital, Bullish, Theta Blockchain Ventures and Protoscale Capital also joined the purchase.
• The tokens came from Anvil’s existing treasury rather than new issuance.
• Anvil launched a new SDK to help businesses integrate the protocol without writing blockchain code.
• Anvil’s total value locked has dropped to around $10 million from a peak near $109 million.

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Founders Fund has led a $5 million purchase of governance tokens in Anvil, a decentralized finance protocol built around digital asset collateral. The firm, backed by Peter Thiel, bought ANVL tokens rather than taking equity in a company.

JUST IN: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund leads a $5M investment to acquire ANVL governance tokens for DeFi collateral protocol Anvil, with other backers including Pantera, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish, and Protoscale Capital. $ANVL pic.twitter.com/GamBuHmW4u

— Bpay News (@bpaynews) October 7, 2026

Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also took part in the purchase. It was announced on Monday. The terms and valuation were not shared publicly.

Anvil told CoinDesk the tokens came from its own treasury. They were not newly created for this sale.

Anvil runs on Ethereum. It is designed to let digital assets act as collateral for payments and credit commitments between businesses.

Alongside the token purchase, Anvil Research Labs released a new software development kit. The company said it will let businesses use Anvil without writing blockchain code themselves.

Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said businesses need confidence that payment and credit commitments will be honored. He said Anvil lets them back those commitments with digital collateral that can be verified.

How Anvil Works

Anvil’s core idea is an on-chain version of a letter of credit. In traditional finance, a bank promises a payment will be made if certain conditions are met.

Anvil replaces that bank with smart contracts. Users lock assets like ETH or USDC into vaults, and that collateral backs a guarantee instead of a loan.

There is no interest charged and no borrowing involved. Anvil also does not charge fees at the protocol level.

Recent governance votes expanded the list of accepted collateral. EURC, cbBTC, sUSDe, WBTC and wstETH were added to the system.

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

Anvil’s Numbers and Background

Anvil launched in January 2025. It started as an open source project built by the Acronym Foundation, without outside funding at first.

Its total value locked currently sits at around $10 million to $14 million, depending on the source. That is down from a peak of nearly $109 million in July 2025.

ANVL has a total supply of 100 billion tokens. Roughly 80 to 88 billion are currently in circulation, with about 60% allocated to partners and community members.

The protocol was founded by Tyler Spalding, who also co-founded the crypto payments company Flexa. He has said Anvil’s structure creates guarantees without some of the default risks found in traditional finance.

Anvil Research Labs named several companies already using or testing its tools, including Consensus, Bitcoin.com and Flexa. Bullish, the parent company of CoinDesk, is also exploring how the protocol could fit into its own operations.

The broader DeFi lending market remains much larger than Anvil. DeFi lending protocols hold about $56 billion in assets combined, with Aave and Morpho the biggest platforms, according to DefiLlama.