With Rambling Clinton Keynote, Ripple Is Sending a Clear Message

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton didn't have to say much when he delivered the keynote at Ripple's Swell conference in San Francisco.

Specifically, the company was saying: Ripple is the kind of company that can book Clinton to speak.

For a company like Ripple there is powerful subtext in booking a Clinton to speak.

In the other outcome, we open the box and Ripple is just another cryptocurrency company looking for a use case: the company sells tens of millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency XRP every quarter through a subsidiary, but as of today, just three relatively obscure firms are making commercial use of the Ripple product that leverages XRP. Meanwhile, Ripple has been taken to court by small-time investors who allege that its sales of XRP constitute an unregistered securities offering.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ripple has begun to assert that it did not create XRP - indeed, its ownership of the majority of the XRP tokens in existence is down to a "Gift" from its creators.

Ripple is playing a high-stakes game, in other words, and it has clearly embarked on a campaign to cultivate the right relationships, project the right image and distance itself from the wrong sorts of crypto companies.

Just a few days ago, it was reported that Ripple and others had created the Securing America's Internet of Value Coalition, an advocacy group that will pay its DC lobbying firm partly in XRP. Ripple's board includes a former co-president of Morgan Stanley; a former superintendent of financial services for the state of New York, who created the state's cryptocurrency regulation; a former State Department official, who now runs a D.C.-Silicon Valley consulting firm with two former cabinet members and a former White House adviser; and an official who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Ripple's choice to book Bill Clinton to speak is entirely consistent with its lobbying efforts, its taste in board members and all the other ways in which it aims to project an image of respectability.

Not only does it seemingly vault Ripple into a small circle of establishment firms that book Clintons: Goldman Sachs, Moran Stanley and Deutsche Bank.

It simultaneously distances Ripple even more emphatically from the world of fly-by-night ICOs, dark web markets, Ponzi schemes, tokens, sectarian hard forks and meat-only diets - the "Crypto" scene that Ripple clearly wants nothing to do with.