Jeonbuk Bank will use Ripple’s 24/7 cross-border payment service for business remittances, but it is unknown whether the flows will use XRP or Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin.
Bank transfers today hop between intermediary banks over the SWIFT messaging network and can take days to arrive. Ripple says its route settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock, which the bank will offer to business customers including importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators.
Fiona Murray, Ripple's managing director for Asia Pacific, said in a statement 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.
XRP traded above $3 at last year's highs and has spent August drifting toward and now through $1, CoinDesk data shows, while Ripple has been signing asset managers, custodians and banks.
The 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.
Futures open interest stood at about $2.78 billion this week, as CoinDesk assessed, 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.