Company now looking to get into mining cryptocurrency
Long Blockchain Corp. (formerly known as Long Island Iced Tea) revealed concrete details of the company’s new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million by selling 1,603,294 shares at a price of $5.25 per share to finance the purchasing 1,000 AntMiner
S9 units, along with power supplies, for $4.2 million, according to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and dated Jan. 4.
The machines would be “installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country.”
Today the company has announced that it was scrapping the stock offering, but it’s still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware and says that it “can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment.”
According to its most recent earnings report for the quarter ended September 30, 2017, the company had $439,673 in cash on hand, but reported a loss of $0.43 per share.
Long Blockchain Corp. is still in development, but is expected to pursue opportunities including building blockchain infrastructure or software for financial services. The company is also looking into a platform for “smart” contracts for “building decentralized applications that provides scalability beyond” what is available now.
The real question is: why should a beverage company get into the blockchain business in the first place? Companies are looking to deploy blockchain which helps improve their core business—such as optimizing supply chain management. However, what is surprising is that Long
Blockchain Corp. is planning on mining cryptocurrencies, which is an unusual play for the corporation.
