Scoop: New details on Palmer Luckey's crypto unicorn
Driving the news: The agreement will see Atticus (or at least its team) effectively merge into something called Erebor, recently formed by Luckey with plans to get a banking license.
Investors in the combined entity would include 8VC, Founders Fund, and Haun Ventures.
Sources say that the new investment will be for around $250 million at the $2.25 billion valuation.
The big picture: Crypto startups and founders say they've been victims of debanking, and this may be Luckey's way to ensure it doesn't happen to him or fellow founders in the future.
Zoom in: On theme with his past companies, Erebor is named after the Lonely Mountain from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit.
The combined business would bank startups, with a stablecoin-native element to it.
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San Francisco | REGISTER NOW This is not a new issue, but as the SRM duopoly held by Northrop Grumman and L3Harris' Aerojet Rocketdyne is increasingly challenged by Anduril and others, it highlights a vulnerability in the supply chain. Jerry McGinn, a former senior industrial base official in the Department of Defense said the need for multiple suppliers of AP dwindled as the demand for SRMs collapsed in the 1990s. The Pentagon backed a 'merger-to-monopoly' in the 1990s, preferring to have one healthy provider rather than two struggling companies that couldn't be competitive without government subsidies, he said. Today's single-source risk is less about capacity than about the demand signal resurgence, he argued. 'Capacity is never the issue,' he said. 'It's just enough orders and lead time to create the fuel.' AMPAC announced in April that its parent company would invest $100 million in a new AP production line, which would increase capacity by 50%. 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