XRP dropped below $1 on Tuesday, declining over 1% on the day and more than 2% on the week, marking the weakest performance among major tokens on both timescales. The price slide coincided with Ripple’s announcement of a partnership with Jeonbuk Bank, a South Korean regional lender founded in 1969 in Jeonju, to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border transfers.
Jeonbuk Bank will offer the service to business customers including importers, exporters, IT startups, and online content creators. Ripple Payments settles transactions in seconds to minutes and operates around the clock, a faster alternative to SWIFT messaging, which can take days to arrive. The bank did not immediately disclose whether the deployment uses XRP or RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, despite inquiry.
The partnership marks Ripple’s third Korean institutional deal in 2026, following earlier agreements with Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank. Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said in a statement to CoinDesk that “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.”
Ripple has spent the past year promoting RLUSD as the settlement asset for institutional work. The stablecoin currently holds $845 million in value on the XRP Ledger, representing 61% of total issuance on the network. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger total $1.38 billion.
XRP traded above $3 at last year’s highs before drifting toward and through the $1 level in August. Despite negative social sentiment over the past three months, traders maintain heavily long XRP futures positions. Open interest in XRP futures reached $2.78 billion this week, with a 3:1 long-to-short ratio on Binance and OKX.
