The Long Island Iced Tea Corporation is known for its bottled beverages that, despite the company’s name, contain no alcohol. At least, it was before Wednesday, when the company announced a pivot to blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin.
Now it’s known as the company whose stock price went through the roof the moment it associated itself with the cryptocurrency craze.
In a press release, the company said it will continue to sell beverages, including a drink that’s “disrupting [the] lemonade category,” but its parent company is changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp. That name change would come with a shift in “its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.”
The tea slingers from Farmingdale are hardly the first to try this gambit. In the past week alone, a gaming company in the U.K., a Chinese fruit-juice company, and Miami-based mobile-payment company all saw their stock prices surge after announcing a new focus on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, that might be because the same thing happened 20 years ago as the dot-com bubble inflated.
