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.
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