Anvil Launches SDK as Founders Fund Leads $5M Token Investment | Markets Outlook

Tyler Spalding (0:00)

You see people all the time in new businesses trying to take out mortgages or loans or even buy cars using their Bitcoin, but they don't want to sell the Bitcoin. They want to hold the Bitcoin for a really long time, but it's worth a lot of money. And if it's worth money and it's liquid, well, then that's going to be a great definition of collateral, so it should be usable for people to be able to earn value or credit based on those assets.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

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Kate Irwin (1:26)

Welcome back to Markets Outlook. My name is Kate Irwin, and today we have special guest, Tyler Spalding, president of the Acronym Foundation. Welcome to Markets Outlook.

Tyler Spalding (1:35)

Hi Kate. Pleasure to be here.

Kate Irwin (1:37)

Yeah.

Thanks so much for joining us. There's lots going on in the crypto space right now. We're seeing markets pretty green, but Acronym Foundation and Anvil Protocol have some special news actually this week around the SDK becoming available to lots of teams. Can you speak a little bit about that news and what folks can look forward to?

Tyler Spalding (2:02)

So yeah, we just launched the SDK today.

At a high level, Anvil is really all about bringing real world utility to crypto and real businesses, real people having this institutional focus where we really believe crypto can really power a lot of financial transactions but yet really live in the background. As you've seen, it's a lot more complex and interacting with crypto and managing seed phrases and try to understand really what's going on. At the end of the day, if this technology is valuable, it should really fade to the background and be really seamless, and just allow for normal financial transactions to take place with crypto in the background. We think that can make things just so much more efficient in certain applications. And so that's what we've really focused on for real world businesses now using Anvil. And now the SDK that we released, we hope will make that a lot easier, being able to embed widgets or this technology into websites, into Web2 applications, enterprise tools, just really, really simple kind of across the board.

Kate Irwin (3:10)

Can you speak a little bit to some of these things that businesses can do with DeFi that maybe they weren't able to do just a few years ago?

Tyler Spalding (3:19)

Yeah, it's actually sort of twofold. Our focus almost is on the normal stuff. So really DeFi enables these sorts of transactions because Anvil at its core is sort of, I'd say it's a letter of credit protocol. That's its simplest use that we have right now, where you can lock collateral and then issue a letter of credit.

And in those instances, you can start using it for buy now, pay later transactions, reservation management, accounts receivable.

All of those examples are live right now, even if it's payments or personal finance. And we see that all happening currently with our partners. And so what we really like to do is just make this just like normal transactions. But now they can be a lot easier and cheaper.

Kate Irwin (4:10)

Speaking a little bit more on the SDK news as well, there's also some token investment news. Can you speak a little bit more to the Founders Fund and others buying $5 million in Anvil tokens and what the motivating factors behind that were and what folks can ultimately do with those tokens?

Tyler Spalding (4:34)

So it's actually really straightforward. Anvil is a decentralized protocol.

To make it as trusted as possible to where everyone can really participate in the management and governance of the protocol itself, we have a governance token and we've already done a really hard amount of work to get it as decentralized to the community's hands, lots of different stakeholders, institutions, community members all participating within Anvil governance. We felt it would be really strong and beneficial to the protocol to have just some of the best and brightest, most prominent names involved not only in crypto but in finance participating. As a part of that, we did sell some of the tokens to Founders Fund who led the round, and then also with participation from really big crypto players like Pantera and Data Blockchain Capital as well as other prominent crypto founders and people that are managing and running other protocols that we think could be just super beneficial to the overall ecosystem.