I Am a Blockchain Too...

We investigate the price reaction of international listed companies in response to blockchain-related announcements. The average abnormal return based on a sample of 979 firm-announcements is approximately 5% with significantly higher returns for smaller firms and for announcements in late 2017 and early 2018. We develop a blockchain company portfolio based on blockchain-related announcements and show that the portfolio follows the evolution of the bitcoin price. Our findings suggest that investors use the performance of bitcoin as an indicator of the expected success of the underlying blockchain technology, and that firms make blockchain-related announcements to benefit from the hype surrounding a new technology.