Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund leads a $5 million token buy in crypto collateral protocol Anvil

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

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 (BLSH), the parent company of CoinDesk, is also working with Anvil to explore how the protocol could be used in its operations.

The ANVL tokens purchased by Founders Fund and the other investors provide governance rights over the protocol, allowing holders to participate in decisions about its development.

A different use for crypto collateral

Anvil is entering a part of decentralized finance where putting crypto up as collateral is already commonplace. DeFi lending protocols currently hold about $56 billion of assets, according to DefiLlama, with Aave and Morpho among the largest platforms.

The protocol, developed by the Acronym Foundation, was bootstrapped and made fully open source. It currently has about $14 million in total value locked on its network, and remains small compared with established DeFi lending platforms

But Anvil is aiming to put crypto collateral to a different use. Conventional DeFi lenders generally allow users to deposit assets as collateral and borrow against them, paying interest and potentially facing liquidation if the value of their collateral falls.