XRP sinks below $1 for first time since 2024 as Korean bank adopts Ripple Payments
Updated 2 hrs agoPublished 2 hrs ago
2 min read
Summary
- XRP fell below $1 and is the weakest major token over the past day and week, even as Ripple expands its institutional partnerships.
- Ripple’s new deal with South Korea’s Jeonbuk Bank brings near real-time cross-border payments to regional business customers but does not clarify which stablecoin powers the transfers.
- Ripple’s push of its RLUSD stablecoin as the main settlement asset helps explain why growing institutional adoption has not lifted XRP, even as traders maintain heavily long futures positions amid increasingly negative social sentiment.
XRP fell below its widely-watched $1 level to 98 cents in Asian morning hours Tuesday, its lowest price since November 2024.
The slide came as Ripple, the payments company closely associated with XRP, announced its third Korean partnership of the year, with Jeonbuk Bank becoming the first regional bank in the country to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border transfers.
That followed custody and wallet infrastructure deals with Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank earlier in 2026. Jeonbuk Bank was founded in 1969 in Jeonju, in Korea's south-west, and is the dominant lender in its home province.
In a release shared with CoinDesk, Ripple describes the service as delivering near real-time stablecoin cross-border settlement, without specifying which asset moves the money.
Bank transfers today hop between intermediary banks over the SWIFT messaging network and can take days to arrive. Ripple says its route settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock, which the bank will offer to business customers including importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators.
Fiona Murray, Ripple's managing director for Asia Pacific, said in a statement the deal reflects growing momentum across Korea's institutional financial sector, with banks building digital asset capability and looking for long-term infrastructure partners. Regional banks play a vital role in the real economy, she said.
The company has spent the past year pushing RLUSD, the dollar-pegged token it issues, as the settlement asset for institutional work. CoinDesk asked Ripple which asset the Jeonbuk deployment uses and did not immediately receive a reply.
This distinction helps explain why a steady run of Ripple partnerships has done little for the token.
XRP traded above $3 at last year's highs and has spent August drifting toward and now through $1, CoinDesk data shows, while Ripple has been signing asset managers, custodians and banks.
The split shows on Ripple's own ledger. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth about $1.38 billion, as CoinDesk reported earlier in the month, of which $845 million is RLUSD. The stablecoin accounts for more than three fifths of everything issued there.
Meanwhile, traders are betting the price turns anyway.
Futures open interest stood at about $2.78 billion this week, as CoinDesk assessed, with more than three accounts holding long XRP positions for every one holding a short on Binance and a similar ratio on OKX, even as commentary about the token across social channels turned its most negative in three months.
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