NEW YORK—There’s a new leader in the sweepstakes for the zaniest name change in the crypto craze.

Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares rose as much as 289 per cent after the unprofitable Hicksville, New York-based company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp. It’s the latest in a near-daily phenomenon sweeping the stock market, where obscure microcap companies reorient to focus on some aspect of the mania sparked by bitcoin’s almost 1,500 per cent rally this year.

Shares in Long Blockchain jumped more than 200 per cent to $7.66 in morning trading. Over the past year, shares have traded between $1.70 and $9.49.

Long Blockchain, whose business has been selling non-alcoholic beverages, says it will now seek to partner with or invest in companies that develop the decentralized ledgers known as blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin.

The renamed firm joins the ranks of recently christened crypto companies — a list that includes former makers of juice, sports bras and sofas — whose share prices have all rocketed after their respective announcements. Some are likening the mania to the dot-com boom, and ultimate bust, two decades ago.

“It’s so reminiscent of what happened in the late 1990s,” Scott Nations, author of ‘A History of the United States in Five Crashes,’ said by phone. “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.”

Long Blockchain’s shares may be benefiting from the announcement, but so far the company has little to show for its aspirations. It has no agreements with any blockchain firms, and says “there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.” A request for comment from chief executive officer Philip Thomas wasn’t immediately returned.

In conjunction with the change in focus, the company cancelled a planned share sale. Long Island Iced Tea, the product of a 2015 merger with Cullen Agricultural Holding Corp., has been funding operations through a combination of equity and debt sales.

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Long Island Iced Tea had a net loss of $3.9 million on sales of $1.6 million in the three months ended Sept. 30. The company has lost $11.6 million on sales of $3.9 million in the first nine months of the year.

The company has reserved the web domain name www.longblockchain.com and will still operate a ready-to-drink beverage subsidiary.

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These “sorts of companies that go up the course of five or 10 times in one day just because they say that they’re a blockchain company now,” Nations said. “To me, that just confirms that we’re in a bubble.”

With files from The Associated Press

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