XRP slips below $1 as a Korean bank adopts Ripple payments

XRP fell below $1 during Asian morning trading hours on Tuesday, its lowest level since November 2024, dropping 0.48% to $0.98 even as Ripple announced a new Korean banking partnership on the same day, CoinDesk reported.

The partner is Jeonbuk Bank, a regional lender founded in 1969 and dominant in South Korea's southwestern Jeonju province, which becomes the first Korean regional bank to deploy Ripple Payments. The service offers 24/7 cross-border settlement for business customers, cutting transfer times from the days a SWIFT wire typically takes down to seconds or minutes, aimed at importers, exporters, IT startups, and online content creators who move money across borders regularly, a customer base that runs into constant friction with a wire system built for occasional large transfers rather than frequent smaller ones. It's Ripple's third Korean partnership announced this year, following an earlier custody and wallet deal with Kyobo Life Insurance and a partnership with Kbank, part of a broader push by Ripple into Korea's regional and specialty banks rather than only its largest national institutions. Notably, CoinDesk asked Ripple directly whether the settlement flows would run on XRP itself or on Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin and did not receive an immediate answer, leaving open exactly how much of this specific deal touches XRP demand at all.

“Growing momentum across Korea's institutional financial sector, as banks build digital asset capabilities.”

— Fiona Murray, Ripple's Asia Pacific managing director

• XRP price: $0.98, down 0.48%, lowest since November 2024 (down from over $3 at last year's highs)
• XRP futures open interest: roughly $2.78 billion
• Long-to-short ratio on Binance and OKX: 3 to 1
• XRP Ledger tokenized real-world assets: about $1.38 billion, with RLUSD accounting for $845 million of total issuance

The gap between the adoption headline and the price move is the real story: XRP's chart has been sliding toward and through $1 for most of August even as Ripple keeps stacking institutional deals, and social media sentiment around the token has reportedly turned its most negative in three months despite the drumbeat of partnership news. That disconnect isn't new for XRP this year — large holders stepped in to defend the $1 level with a fresh RLUSD mint earlier this month, the same psychological line the token just broke through here, suggesting whale support around that price has limits when broader positioning turns bearish. It also fits a wider pattern of Korean financial institutions moving onto blockchain rails faster than XRP's own price reflects: KB Kookmin, the country's largest bank, launched JPMorgan's Kinexys blockchain for cross-border payments earlier this year, a reminder that bank-level infrastructure adoption in Korea is running on its own timeline, largely independent of what any single token tied to that infrastructure is doing day to day. The unanswered question of whether Jeonbuk Bank's flows even touch XRP directly, rather than routing entirely through RLUSD, only sharpens that point: a bank going live on Ripple's rails is not automatically a demand event for the token itself, and pricing XRP purely off adoption headlines risks reading a signal into the deal that the underlying settlement flow hasn't actually confirmed yet.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.