XRP dropped below the closely watched $1 threshold to 98 cents on Tuesday, marking its lowest level since November 2024, even as Ripple unveiled a landmark partnership with South Korea’s Jeonbuk Bank.The token, the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has been in steady decline since trading above $3 at its 2025 highs. August has been particularly brutal, with XRP drifting through support levels as broader crypto market weakness and persistent selling pressure erode gains from last year’s rally.
Jeonbuk Bank Marks Ripple’s Third Korean Deal of 2026
Ripple announced that Jeonbuk Bank, the dominant lender in its southwestern Korean province of Jeonju, has become the first regional bank in South Korea to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border transfers. The system settles payments in seconds to minutes and operates around the clock, a stark contrast to traditional SWIFT transfers that can take days.
Why Institutional Adoption Has Not Lifted XRP
The deal is Ripple’s third Korean partnership this year, following agreements with Kyobo Life Insurance for blockchain-based government bond settlements and Kbank for institutional custody services. The breadth of Ripple’s expansion across payments, custody, treasury, and digital wallets in Korea is notable. Yet the token has failed to benefit, and the reason may lie in which asset actually moves the money.
Regional banks play a vital role in the real economy, and this deal reflects growing momentum across Korea’s institutional financial sector, said Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, in a statement.
Ripple has spent the past year pushing RLUSD, its dollar-pegged stablecoin, as the primary settlement asset for institutional work. CoinDesk reported that RLUSD now accounts for more than three-fifths of the roughly $1.38 billion in tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger. If Jeonbuk Bank’s cross-border flows use RLUSD rather than XRP as the bridge currency, the partnership may do little to drive demand for the token itself.
Futures Traders Betting on a Reversal
Despite the bearish price action, derivatives markets tell a different story. Futures open interest stands at about $2.78 billion, with more than three traders holding long XRP positions for every short on Binance and a similar ratio on OKX. Social media sentiment around XRP has turned its most negative in three months, yet leveraged traders are positioning for a rebound.
The Broader Market Context
The XRP decline mirrors weakness across the crypto market, where Bitcoin has slipped from above $126,000 last October to roughly $63,000-64,000. Rising U.S. Treasury yields and ongoing geopolitical tensions have weighed on risk assets, while the Federal Reserve’s split vote on interest rates at its July meeting has left markets uncertain about the policy path forward.
Sources: CoinDesk; Ripple press release; Benzinga; The Crypto Basic
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