A silver XRP coin crosses a market threshold as a payment route links South Korea to a regional bank

XRP Just Broke Below $1 as Ripple Landed a Major Bank Deal — The Missing Detail Matters

By Isaac • August 18, 2026 7:07 am • Comments

XRP just lost one of the most closely watched price levels in crypto.

The token slipped below $1 during Asian trading Tuesday, touching 98 cents and reaching its lowest level since November 2024. That would have been notable on any day.

It was especially striking because it happened just as Ripple announced another real-world banking deal in South Korea.

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The two developments tell a more complicated story than either the price drop or the partnership headline suggests.

According to CoinDesk, XRP was the weakest major crypto asset over both the prior day and week when it broke below the dollar mark. The token had traded above $3 at its 2025 highs, but that strength has steadily unwound through August.

The same report put XRP futures open interest near $2.78 billion this week. It also found more than three long-positioned accounts for every short account on Binance, with a similar imbalance on OKX even as social sentiment deteriorated.

That combination makes the move below $1 more than a cosmetic price print. It puts a crowded bullish trade on the wrong side of a level the market had not lost since late 2024.

At the same time, Ripple said Jeonbuk Bank has become the first regional bank in Korea to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border remittances.

In its official announcement, Ripple said the service replaces a chain of intermediary banks and multi-day SWIFT processing with settlement in seconds to minutes. It also runs around the clock, giving the bank a route that does not shut down when traditional business hours end.

Jeonbuk plans to offer the faster route to business customers including import-export companies, IT startups, and online content creators. Those are precisely the customers most exposed to delayed supplier payments, uncertain arrival times, and the cost of routing money through multiple institutions.

That is a meaningful institutional win. Regional banks serve companies that feel cross-border payment friction directly, and Jeonbuk is not an isolated Korean experiment.

The deal follows Ripple’s 2026 partnerships with Kyobo Life Insurance on on-chain government-bond settlement and Kbank on institutional custody and wallet infrastructure.

Ripple Asia-Pacific managing director Fiona Murray framed the rollout as part of a broader buildout across Korea’s institutional financial sector. Her point was practical: regional banks sit close to the businesses that still absorb the delay and friction of legacy international transfers.

Jeonbuk Bank president Park Choon-won described the partnership as a new growth engine for the bank and part of its effort to operate at global digital-finance standards. Ripple also said the three Korean institutions entered with different needs—payments, custody, wallets, and tokenized settlement—which shows the company is selling an infrastructure stack rather than one narrow product.

But here is the detail XRP holders cannot ignore: neither Ripple’s announcement nor the bank’s public description says which asset will actually move through the new payment corridor.

Ripple Payments can use different settlement assets. Ripple has also spent the past year putting its dollar-backed RLUSD stablecoin at the center of more institutional products.

CoinDesk reported that tokenized real-world assets on XRP Ledger were worth about $1.38 billion, with RLUSD accounting for roughly $845 million of that total.

That does not mean the Jeonbuk deployment excludes XRP. It means the announcement, as published, does not establish XRP demand.

The distinction matters because a Ripple business win and an XRP price catalyst are related ideas, but they are not automatically the same thing.

The market is still positioned for a rebound. Long accounts heavily outnumbered short accounts on Binance and OKX.

That makes the break below $1 even more important: crowded optimism can fuel a sharp recovery, but it can also accelerate liquidations if support fails.

For now, Ripple’s Korean expansion is real, the institutional use case is getting stronger, and XRP holders still need one unanswered question resolved. Until the settlement asset is disclosed, the bank deal proves demand for Ripple’s infrastructure—not necessarily demand for XRP itself.

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