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DEVELOPING: Kodak pivots to cryptocurrency

They're finally going digital

Kodak, the 130-year-old photography company built on analog, is finally focusing on digital — with a bitcoin competitor it’s calling KodakCoin.

The company announced Tuesday it will use the encrypted, peer-to-peer currency technology to power KodakOne, a site it is founding to help photographers share and license their work.

"Kodak has always sought to democratize photography and make licensing fair to artists,” Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke said in a statement. “These technologies give the photography community an innovative and easy way to do just that."

Kodak, which dominated the film industry for decades until the market turned digital, has been declining for years, leading to a 2012 struggle with bankruptcy. The company did not explain what specifically necessitated creating a cryptocurrency, but the announcement did touch off a rare wave of excitement about the company, sending its stock rocketing up 45 percent.

It’s been a spectacular year for cryptocurrencies as blockchain, the decentralized ledgering technology that underlies cryptocurrencies, fully hit the mainstream. Investors flocked to change their dollars into bitcoins, causing the price to spike by nearly 20 times in 2017.

The looming bubble burst hasn’t stopped companies in industries as varied as biopharmaceuticals and iced tea from joining the trend — and watching their stock prices soar as a result.

And it’s not just small companies getting in on the action. Wall Street itself has been wrangling with how to harness the new technology. In February, a group of financial heavyweights including J.P. Morgan Chase, Mastercard, and UBS and tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco banded together to build a version of another popular technology based on digital currency, Ethereum, for businesses.