At Ripple's Snoop Dogg Party, A Search for XRP

As part of the first-ever New York Blockchain Week, Snoop Dogg was booked to perform at the XRP Community Night on Tuesday.

XRP mania was difficult to find at the party.

"Has anyone seen any pics yet of last night's party of the actual XRP community and not Ripple employees?" one user posted to XRP Chat, a forum for the cryptocurrency's enthusiasts.

"From what I have seen so far it seems to have been more like a staff Christmas party than a party hosted for the XRP community."

A couple of years ago, executives at Ripple - the company - had no problem referring to their cryptocurrency as lower-case "Ripple." But today, after the XRP rebrand, Ripple is.

Ripple sponsored the event and booked the entertainment for XRP Community Night, employees in attendance told me.

About a third of the "XRP community" there were Ripple employees, all of whom wore t-shirts with the XRP logo - a disconnected X. The company logo graced the bar's cocktail menu.

All this intermingling of Ripple and XRP was difficult to reconcile with scenes from a UK parliamentary hearing just a couple weeks prior, when Ripple's director of regulatory relations Ryan Zagone insisted, "There's not a direct connection between Ripple the company and XRP.".

Ripple owns "a significant amount of XRP" - the majority - Zagone acknowledged, but that was "Gifted to us" by XRP's open-source developers.

Snoop has distanced himself from that phase of his life now, much as Ripple has distanced itself from XRP. It seemed a fitting metaphor: both Ripple and Snoop were tossing out little tokens of that half-repudiated identity.