Reece Merrick, the Managing Director of Middle East and Africa at Ripple, has taken to the X social media network to address one of the common misconceptions surrounding the XRP cryptocurrency. According to Merrick, the common one is that Ripple and XRP are believed to be the same thing. Some media outlets and even major exchanges have struggled to distinguish between Ripple and XRP. In 2019, for instance, Kraken was slammed by the XRP community for misnaming the token. "It's irresponsible when exchanges misrepresent digital assets in this way," Ripple CTO David Schwartz tweeted. As reported by U.Today, XRP recently celebrated its 13th birthday. The token was created with the lines of code that were submitted by Ripple co-founder Arthur Britto. In its lawsuit against Ripple, the SEC stated that the 100 billion XRP tokens were minted by the company's bosses "at little cost." Some critics believe that Ripple and XRP are anonymous since the token was created by the company. Preston Byrne, for instance, pointed to the fact that Ripple Labs owned the intellectual property related to the token. Moreover, the software behind XRP was not even open source during the token's early days. He argued that the companies' efforts to separate Ripple from XRP are just legal maneuvers. However, Schwartz argued that the same people who created XRP also happened to create Ripple, insisting that the token predates the company. Moreover, distributing XRP was one of the key goals behind the creation of the company. In its defense, Ripple has repeatedly compared XRP to oil and diamonds. In one of its filings, the company said that it could be compared to ExxonMobil or De Beers.