Chanticleer Holdings, the owner of several burger brands, including nine restaurants franchised by Hooters, announced on January 2, 2018, that it would be using a form of blockchain-related technology for its rewards program.
Rising Stocks and Blockchain Craze
Shortly after the press release, the company’s stock prices shot up over 50 percent, presumably due to the increased speculation of the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and the rise of bitcoin.
A minority investor in Hooters’ chain of restaurants in the United States, Chanticleer Holdings, is working with Mobivity to integrate its rewards program with the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity, stated that “Every meal enjoyed at any Chanticleer Holdings brand will accrue currency for the consumer that can be used for future meals or traded with other consumers.” He also went on to compare mining cryptocurrencies to eating a burger, saying that the two were essentially the same since the introduction of the rewards system.
The CEO of Chanticleer, Michael Pruitt, believes that the company’s blockchain-based reward program employs the same underlying technology, principles, and infrastructure as bitcoin, Ripple, and Litecoin.
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Pruitt further stated in a press release that putting consumer interaction and purchase related data on a blockchain will not only help companies keep track of user activity but also give those customers access and ownership to records of all of their transactions.
In the past year, especially towards the latter half of 2017, plenty of companies have observed similar results after the adding the word “blockchain” to their brand names. Just a month ago, shares of Long Island Iced Tea soared as much as 290 percent following a rebrand of the company to Long Blockchain Corp.
Without investors having a firm understanding of which companies have made significant and noteworthy progress in adopting the technology though, microcap businesses are almost incentivized to associate themselves with a blockchain in some way or another.
The blockchain mania is reminiscent of the infamous dot-com bubble that reached its peak in the late nineties. This tech craze saw a similar rise of companies associated with anything related to the internet. Most of these companies ultimately collapsed when the dot-com bubble finally burst in 2001.
As for the case of Chanticleer Holdings, in particular, the success of its blockchain-based system remains to be seen. The company hopes to conclude the roll-out of the program across all of its associated brands by the end of 2018.