Iced tea company’s stock triples after move to digital currency

An iced tea company is the latest business to capitalize off the new hype around cryptocurrency.

The Long Island Iced Tea Corp., which sells beverages, changed its name to the Long Blockchain Corp. and announced that it was looking at partnerships with companies that invest in blockchain, the technology digital currency bitcoin is built on.

Shares of its stock initially rose by roughly 500 percent on Thursday after the name change. Its share price has since gone down but is still more than three times the pre-announcement level.

{mosads}But Long Blockchain Corp. has no partnerships with any bitcoin firms yet and says “there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.”

Long Blockchain Corp. will also continue sell its iced tea and other drinks.

“It’s so reminiscent of what happened in the late 1990s,” Scott Nations, author of “A History of the United States in Five Crashes,” told Bloomberg. “A company that had nothing to do with the internet would put out a press release that they were going to become an internet company now, and the same sort of thing would happen.”

The cryptocurrency market has received tremendous attention in recent weeks after prominent digital currencies like bitcoin and Ethereum, and also smaller currencies like Ripple, Iota and Augur, surge in value.