Founders Fund's $5 million Anvil token buy bets on businesses using crypto as a letter of credit

Terms and valuation were not disclosed ^[7], so the $5 million cannot be turned into a price per ANVL or a value for the protocol. The one supply figure on record is that 80 billion of the 100 billion tokens circulate ^[16], which leaves 20 billion outside circulation ^[18].

Measured against what the protocol holds, the ticket is large. Anvil has about $14 million locked on its network ^[17], so the buyers paid a sum equal to roughly 36% of everything it currently secures ^[19]. DeFi lending protocols hold about $56 billion, according to DefiLlama, with Aave and Morpho among the biggest ^[14]. Anvil's $14 million is about 0.025% of that ^[20].

That comparison is a little unfair to Anvil, or rather, it measures two different products. Conventional DeFi lenders take a deposit, lend against it, charge interest and can liquidate the position if the collateral falls in value ^[8]. According to a CoinDesk Research report, the provider of an Anvil guarantee does not have to borrow or pay interest to create it ^[6]. The $14 million backs guarantees. The $56 billion backs loans.

Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, described the customer as a business. "Businesses need to know the commitments behind payments and credit will be honored," he 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." ^[10] Anvil Research Labs, the company building enterprise tools for the protocol, says the kit lets businesses and financial institutions integrate without writing blockchain code ^[9].

The partner list backs up the business half of that pitch better than the financial-institution half. No bank appears among the companies named, though Anvil Research Labs also cited several partners it did not name ^[11].

This could go a few ways. If the SDK brings in companies that cannot or will not write blockchain code, the locked value grows with them. If the integrators turn out to be companies already working onchain, a no-code kit solves a problem they do not have. And Anvil could still find its depositors inside DeFi, competing for the collateral the large lenders already hold ^[14].

I think the buyers are paying for a customer list Anvil has not yet published. The counter-case is that a $5 million treasury sale is a modest ticket into a bootstrapped, open-source protocol ^[5], and the enterprise framing is the sales pitch that comes with it. If the locked value stays near $14 million once SDK integrations go live, the second reading wins ^[17].