Founders Fund leads $5 million token purchase in Anvil protocol

Founders Fund, the venture firm backed by Peter Thiel, has led a $5 million token purchase in Anvil, a crypto collateral protocol, according to CoinDesk. The deal is not a classic equity round. It is a token buy, which puts one of Silicon Valley’s best-known firms directly into a DeFi protocol’s governance asset. What Anvil actually does Anvil operates on Ethereum using a structure called an on-chain letter of credit. In traditional finance, a letter of credit is a promise, usually from a bank, that a payment will be made if certain conditions are met. Anvil swaps the bank for smart contracts. Users lock collateral, mainly ETH or USDC, into vaults. That locked collateral then backs guarantees that are programmable and designed to resist default. No intermediary is needed to vouch for anyone. The protocol is built to avoid loans, interest payments, and handing custody of assets to a third party. Anvil also charges no fees at the protocol level. The numbers behind the protocol Anvil launched in January 2025. It started as a bootstrapped, open-source project from the Acronym Foundation. Its total value locked currently stands at around $10 million. That figure peaked at nearly $109 mi...