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

Fiona Murray, Ripple's managing director for Asia Pacific, said 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.

That distinction helps explained 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, while Ripple has been signing asset managers, custodians and banks.

The same 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, 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.