Iced tea company scraps plans to raise millions for blockchain pivot

Enlarge (credit: Lipton / Timothy B. Lee)

Last month we covered the story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as Long Blockchain as part of a broader shift in corporate strategy. The company's stock price tripled over night.

On Friday, we got the first concrete details of the company's new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million with a stock offering and then use some of the money to buy 1,000 Antminer S9 bitcoin mining machines. The machines would be "installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country."

But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it's still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."

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