Many others had done it, but nobody quite as blatantly as beverage maker Long Island Iced Tea Corp, which in late December, bizarrely but profitably changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp, which sent its shares soaring by 500%.

In an ironic twist, we previewed LTEA’s hilarious “pivot” just one day earlier when – discussing a similar surge in microcap stock Net Element – we said:

Now that it is abundantly clear that for a stock to explode higher, all that is necessary – and sufficient – is a press release mentioning the company’s name and throwing in the word “blockchain” in the same sentence (see Riot Blockchain and LongFin Corp), other public microcaps have decided that if that’s all it takes, then by all means they will gladly take investors’ money.

Indeed, as the value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in recent months, companies previously focused on making fitness apparel, bras, cigars and beverages (and many other unrelated things) have rebranded themselves as virtual currency or blockchain companies of one sort or another. In this light, what Long Island Ice Tea Blockchain did was the culmination of what to many is clear mania behavior, as many obscure companies have pivoted operations or simply changed their names to cash-in on the cryptocurrency wave, a trend reminiscent of the dotcom boom. As profiled previously, a barrage of companies have seen their shares sky-rocket, largely on words such as “crypto” or “blockchain” in their names.

And investors cheered them on, pushing their stock prices up, forcing countless microcaps to ride the “Blockchain train”

Then, this week it was Kodak’s turn, which seeking to capitalize on the euphoria, announced the launch of Kodakcoin, “a photocentric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.”