XRP slips below $1 even as a Korean regional bank adopts Ripple Payments

XRP's value dropped below $1 on Tuesday, declining over 1% for the day and more than 2% over the past week, marking the lowest point among major tokens. Ripple, the company linked to XRP, unveiled its third partnership with a Korean bank, Jeonbuk Bank, which marked the first regional lender in the nation to utilize Ripple Payments for cross-border transactions.

This follows prior collaborations with Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank in 2026. Jeonbuk Bank, established in 1969 in Jeonju, southwestern Korea, is the leading lender in its province. Traditionally, bank transfers traverse multiple intermediary banks via the SWIFT messaging system, often taking several days to complete. Ripple's solution promises settlement in seconds to minutes, operating around the clock, a service aimed at business customers like importers, exporters, IT startups, and online content creators.

Ripple describes the service as facilitating near real-time stablecoin cross-border settlement, without specifying the asset involved. Fiona Murray, Ripple's managing director for Asia Pacific, highlighted the deal as indicative of growing institutional financial sector momentum in Korea, with banks enhancing digital asset capabilities and seeking long-term infrastructure partners.

Regional banks are crucial to the real economy, she emphasized. Ripple has been promoting RLUSD, a dollar-pegged token, as the settlement asset for institutional transactions throughout the past year. However, despite multiple Ripple partnerships, the token's price has remained stagnant. At its peak last year, XRP reached above $3, but it has been gradually slipping towards $1 this August.

Ripple, on the other hand, has been signing asset managers, custodians, and banks. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger currently amount to around $1.38 billion, with $845 million in RLUSD. The stablecoin constitutes over three-fifths of the issued assets. Traders are optimistic about a price turnaround, with futures open interest reaching approximately $2.78 billion this week, showing more than three long positions for every short one on Binance and a similar ratio on OKX.

Social media sentiment about the token reached its most negative in three months. Moreover, combined exchange volumes fell by 23.9% to $3.76 trillion in July, its lowest level since November 2023, as decentralized exchange spot market share surged to a record 19.5% and RWA perpetuals hit $460 billion.