Palmer Luckey, cofounder of the weapons manufacturer Anduril, along with firms connected to Palantir cofounders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel, are investing in a new bank that is aiming to fill a gap left by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two years ago. The venture is expected to be backed by upwards of $250 million in funding from Luckey, Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC, Thiel’s Founders Fund, crypto-focused VC Haun Ventures, and several angel investors whose identities are not yet publicly known.
Like Anduril and Palantir, Erebor Bank is named after a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien (introduced in The Hobbit, it’s the name of a mountain where the murderous dragon Smaug hoards gold and jewels). The bank’s organizers and backers have remained tight-lipped about their vision. But their national bank charter application filed in June with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as well as interviews with more than a dozen industry sources, suggest the organizers are leveraging current regulatory openness in banking, as well as their political power, to build a crypto-focused Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) successor made in their image.
The leadership team named in Erebor’s application includes Michael Hagedorn, an experienced bank executive who will serve as Erebor’s President; Trevor Capozza, head of operations at Palmer Luckey’s family office; and co-CEOs Owen Rapaport, cofounder of crypto compliance platform Aer Compliance, and Jacob Hirshman, who has served in regulatory and advisory roles at the stablecoin provider Circle. Erin Gleason, Chief Communications Officer of Founders Fund, told WIRED that Thiel was “not involved” in the deal, and that Founders Fund invested $1 million into Erebor. Luckey and Lonsdale are not named in the nonconfidential sections of Erebor’s filings; the application notes that major shareholders will not be involved in day-to-day operations.
Luckey, 8VC, Erebor’s organizers, and their attorney, Adam Cohen, did not respond to requests for comment.
Erebor’s intended client base is similar to that of Silicon Valley Bank, which served as the go-to business-banking partner for the Bay Area tech industry and its affiliates. (SVB famously collapsed in March 2023 after economic volatility and risky liquidity practices led to a run on the bank. First Citizens Bank purchased SVB after the collapse; it now operates as a subsidiary.) The proposed bank states in its OCC filing that its customers would include startups in industries like crypto, AI, and defense, as well as wealthy and ultrawealthy consumers working in these fields. It also plans to assist foreign banks with some dollar-based activities. Erebor claims its target business clients are currently “not well served by either traditional or disruptive financial institutions, in particular with respect to insufficient access to credit,” and says it will maintain a conservative balance sheet to account for the risks of “having a loan portfolio focused on frontier industries.”
Erebor also has crypto aspirations, including becoming “the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions,” and facilitating “broader acceptance of stablecoins.” (Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is tied to a currency or traditionally less-volatile commodity; they are often backed by cash or instruments like treasury bills with the aim of maintaining a consistent value.) The bank additionally says it would accept cryptocurrencies as collateral for some loans.
Erebor is part of a growing wave of corporations applying for bank charters following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Regulators appointed by Trump have expressed an interest in reviewing new entrants with an “open mind.”
“The OCC is being very friendly to new applicants,” says Michele Alt, a regulatory consultant who previously worked in the OCC’s Law Department. Alt says she believes that under Trump, the OCC is trying to accelerate the review process for new banks, and applicants may see approvals within four to six months of filing, down from the current year-plus waiting period. (An OCC spokesperson said it “does not comment on pending licensing applications or specific financial institutions” in response to a request for comment by WIRED.)
The Trump administration has also reversed several Biden-era rules that limited banks from using stablecoins for payments and holding dollar reserves for stablecoin providers, opening the floodgates for financial institutions to launch stablecoin-based payment systems and serve stablecoin companies as clients. In March, for example, Rodney Hood, then-acting head of the OCC, overturned a Biden-era directive that had compelled banks to prove that they had “controls in place to conduct [stablecoin] activity in a safe and sound manner” before using stablecoin products and services. The Trump family, meanwhile, launched its own Trump-branded stablecoin earlier this year.
Stablecoin advocates say the technology can be used to make real-time, cross-border payments more affordable. Some point to their use for remittances, or laud stablecoins’ ability to expand the power of the US dollar. Detractors argue that stablecoins effectively remove US dollars from circulation, weakening the power of the Fed to set and control monetary policy. Migrating to a digital system that has experienced crashes and is weakly regulated also raises fears of contagion, which could elevate risk and erode trust in financial systems.
Crypto companies Circle, Ripple, BitGo, and a subsidiary of Protego are all applying for banking charters; Coinbase is “actively considering” a charter application; and payments firm Wise has also filed with the OCC.
If approved by the OCC and other regulators, Erebor can accept deposits, make loans, and be eligible for Federal Reserve payment systems as well as FDIC insurance. (Circle, Protego, and Wise are applying for charters primarily for facilitating payments through federal systems.)
Some new charter applications reflect “the adoption of ‘pay to play’ in a whole lot of areas that traditionally did not work that way,” says Todd Baker, a financial services executive and senior fellow at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School. Luckey and Lonsdale have been outspoken supporters and funders of Donald Trump as well as successful government contractors.
That the cofounders of a weapons manufacturer and surveillance behemoth have set their sights on banking may raise some eyebrows. There are some statutes, such as the Bank Holding Company Act and Change of Bank Control Act, that aim to prevent commercial ventures and their owners from engaging in banking activities or exerting control over banks (with a few exceptions). At the same time, as an early adopter of blockchain-based cross-border payments technologies for defense and law-enforcement purposes, such as for paying assets overseas, the US government may find Erebor useful as a clearing house for blockchain-based government activities, according to Kevin Lehtiniitty, an executive in stablecoin-based payments infrastructure who’s counted US government agencies as clients.
“What I imagine is going on here is that should this become a new chartered bank… the bank would be providing this ‘cash in, obfuscated crypto out’ type of a product that would allow these agencies to be able to make payments,” he says.
Anduril also knows how to sell to the US government, and Erebor can use some parts of Anduril’s growth strategy, says Rory McDonald, a business school professor at the University of Virginia who has studied Anduril. In Anduril’s case, Palmer Luckey and his cofounders started by targeting the US government’s border-security technologies, identifying them as a “fringe” part of the defense market. They offered an “imperfect but good enough technological solution and then [rode] the wave of improvement in that technology,” McDonald tells WIRED.
High-risk startups in crypto, AI, and defense may be that fringe market for Erebor—especially crypto companies. Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank—both of which failed around the same time as SVB—had also aimed to corner the crypto business-banking market by offering crypto-focused services.
Stephen Marcus, Co-Founder and General Partner of Riot Ventures, which invests in some of the industries Erebor intends to serve, says Erebor will soon have to speak publicly about its products and determine how it will “communicate the stability” to potential business clients. “At the end of the day, these companies need access to liquidity, and they can’t afford to have their cash not accessible,” he says, noting the “notoriety of the investors and those that are booting it up might be helpful,” though they’ll have to “earn” companies’ trust outside the portfolio companies whose banking decisions they can influence more easily.
Granted, that assumes Erebor gets that far; for all the deregulation making charter approvals speedier and more likely, regulators may see Erebor’s application as too unprecedented or systemically risky. According to Evey Guo, Principal at lobbying firm and consulting group FS Vector (founded by the former Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel of Circle), Erebor’s “novel elements” may elicit “additional regulatory scrutiny and require particularly robust controls.” Another banking industry specialist said Erebor’s “monocrop” client profile could also cause concern, as a lack of client diversity partially contributed to the bank collapses of 2023. Additionally, Baker, the Senior Fellow at Columbia, contends Erebor’s conservative approach to lending relative to its balance sheet may impose hurdles, as regulators have rejected previous banking proposals that shied away from lending.
Michele Alt, the regulatory consultant, sees a potential clash between the crypto industry and incumbent banks, which are “two very powerful lobbies,” in the wake of these charter applications. Organizations like the American Bankers Association (ABA) and Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) may attempt to take legal action or otherwise object to some charter applications, as the ICBA has most recently in a letter to the OCC, “strongly” opposing the attempt by Protego’s subsidiary to enter the space. The outcome for Erebor, as well as the slew of stablecoin banking ventures popping up, depends on incumbents’ litigiousness, and on the ability for banking regulators to function as arbiters upholding some integrity within a multi-trillion-dollar banking system.
“We know that [regulators] have deprioritized certain areas consistent with the policies of the current administration, but I would say, if not the federal banking agencies—who will regulate these banks?” Alt says.
