Crypto brands decay in a brutal echo of the Dotcom era

By Lionel Laurent

The crypto collapse has made Blockchain a dirty word. Bitcoin miner Riot Blockchain Inc., once the poster child for rebranding designed to capture the investment zeitgeist, now wants to be known as Riot Platforms after a near-90% share-price fall in 2022. It's a symbolic moment that attests to the B-word's shift to curse from blessing on the stock market, where investors have fallen prey to misguided euphoria and the failure to deliver viable business models. And if there's one safe bet in 2023, it's that Riot won't be the last firm to change tack.

Given the scale of the FTX collapse, it's easy to overlook just how all-consuming the broader economic sinkhole of cryptocurrency and blockchain investments has been, with new listings and the blockchain-ification of existing companies offering more hype than substance. The prevalence of blockchain-fueled corporate name changes goes beyond Riot —  known as Bioptix Inc. until its pivot to crypto in 2017 — and should ring alarm bells, with nine firms adopting the words "blockchain" or "crypto" or "NFT" last year, including digital-ad firm NFTY SA and battery-tech firm CryptoBlox Technologies Inc. That's the most since 2018, when 24 firms appropriated crypto handles, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. There's a broad similarity to the adoption of the word "dotcom" during the 1990s tech boom.

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