Palmer Luckey's Erebor bank receives federal charter — the first full-service national bank charter in years

Palmer Luckey's Erebor bank has received its federal charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and is now operating as a full-service national bank. The charter is the first issued under Comptroller Jonathan Gould's tenure, which began approximately seven months before the segment was recorded.

“Erebor, the new bank for the tech community building things that actually matter, has officially received its charter and become operational. Silicon Valley Bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them. I realized you didn't have banks that were aligned with US interests, aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy. We had to have $350,000,000 in regulatory capital just sitting in an account to backstop it.”

Luckey founded Erebor after the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which he describes as a failure that "took everybody's money." The new bank serves deep tech, hard tech, energy, and defense-adjacent companies. Luckey argues these sectors lacked aligned banking infrastructure in the U.S. financial system.

Erebor required $350 million in regulatory capital held in reserve to backstop the bank's operations. That capital is now in place and the bank is live.

The gap Luckey identified was not a shortage of banks broadly but a shortage of banks aligned with the specific industries and risk profiles of U.S. deep tech and defense builders. SVB's failure did not create that need but exposed it.