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.
This distinction helps explain 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, 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.
Meanwhile, traders are betting the price turns anyway.
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.