This paper examines the impact of blockchain and crypto-related name changes on corporate and financial performance of the corporations. We document several pieces of evidence suggesting that companies who partake in such “crypto-exuberant” naming practices become more volatile and offer substantial and persistent stock market premiums as a reward for their corporate identity change. However, the retroactive name changes harm firm's short-term profitability and have a dampening effect on financial leverage of the company. This paper advances the Dotcom effect literature by providing novel results on the changing traditional pathways of price discovery and information flows after the announcement of corporate name changes to blockchain-related names. The identified contagion channels display that crypto-exuberant companies become more susceptible to cryptocurrency markets, which should interest regulators and investors.

This paper investigates how companies can utilise Twitter social media-derived sentiment as a method of generating short-term corporate value from statements based on initiated blockchain-development. Results indicate that investors were subjected to a very sophisticated form of asymmetric information designed to propel sentiment and market euphoria, that translates into increased access to leverage on the part of speculative firms. Technological-development firms are found to financially behave in a profoundly different fashion to reactionary-driven firms which have no background in ICT technological development, and who experience an estimated increased one-year probability of default of 170 bps. Rating agencies are found to have under-estimated the risk on-boarded by these speculative firms, failing to identify that they should be placed under an increased degree of scrutiny. Unfiltered market sentiment information, regulatory unpreparedness and mis-pricing by trusted market observers has resulted in a situation where investors and lenders have been compromised by direct exposure to an asset class becoming known for law-breaking activity, financial losses and frequent reputational damage.