Tuesday, August 18, 2026 · XRPTRACER news
By XRPTRACER Research Team
XRP broke below $1 today. It fell to about 98 cents in Asian morning hours, its lowest price since November 2024, CoinDesk reports. It happened on the same day Ripple announced that Jeonbuk Bank will deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border business transfers, its third Korean partnership of 2026.
XRP market moves
XRP opened August 18 (00:00 UTC) at about $1.00, with a market cap near $62.8B (CoinGecko daily history), before dipping under the line in Asia. It was about $1.06 on August 1 and has slid most of the month. Volume is thin: CoinGecko shows about $0.83B traded in the 24 hours to today's snapshot, and the day before was under $0.5B. CoinDesk calls XRP the weakest major token over the past day and week.
What Jeonbuk Bank is doing
The deal. Jeonbuk Bank, founded in 1969 in Jeonju and the dominant lender in its home province, becomes the first regional bank in South Korea to deploy Ripple Payments. Ripple says the service replaces multi-day SWIFT transfers with settlement in seconds to minutes, 24/7.
Who it's for. Business customers: importers and exporters, IT startups and online content creators.
The Korea pattern. This follows Ripple's custody and wallet deals with Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank earlier this year.
What wasn't disclosed. Ripple's release describes "near real-time stablecoin cross-border settlement" but doesn't say which asset moves the money. CoinDesk asked whether the flows use XRP or RLUSD and didn't get an immediate reply. Launch timing, corridors, currencies, fees and expected volumes weren't disclosed either.
Question everything
This is the split XRP holders keep running into: Ripple keeps signing banks, and the token keeps falling. The reason is in the release. Ripple has spent the past year pushing RLUSD as its settlement asset for institutions, and a deal described as "stablecoin settlement" is not a deal for XRP. CoinDesk's numbers make the same point: tokenized assets on XRPL are worth about $1.38B, of which $845M is RLUSD. Until a partner says XRP is used as a bridge asset, treat each new bank as adoption of Ripple's rails, not demand for the coin.
What people are talking about
CoinDesk notes increasingly negative social sentiment around XRP even as futures traders stay heavily long. That's a risky mix near a round-number level: if $1 doesn't hold, crowded longs can turn a dip into a flush. On the other side, longer-term holders are pointing to the partnership run as proof the network is growing, even if the price hasn't caught up yet.
On-chain data
- XRP price: about $1.00 at 00:00 UTC; intraday low about $0.98 (CoinGecko; CoinDesk)
- Market cap: about $62.8B (CoinGecko)
- 24h volume: about $0.83B (CoinGecko daily data)
- Tokenized RWAs on XRPL: about $1.38B, incl. $845M RLUSD (CoinDesk, earlier in August)
- Settlement asset for Jeonbuk flows: not disclosed
Flows and macro
ETF buyers aren't stepping in. US spot XRP ETFs have taken in only about +$2.1M net in August through August 17, per XRP Insights. That's tiny next to the roughly $1.47B these funds had gathered since launch by late June (per CryptoSlate), and it's not enough to absorb selling at this level.
What to watch next
- Daily closes vs $1: one wick below is noise, several closes below is a trend
- Funding rates and open interest, given CoinDesk's report of crowded longs
- Ripple's answer on which asset settles Jeonbuk's flows
- ETF flows, for any sign of dip buying
- Ripple's next Korea deal, and whether any names XRP as the bridge asset
The XRPTRACER take
Jeonbuk is a real win for Ripple's payments business, and it's the kind of headline that used to move XRP. Today it didn't, and the missing detail about the settlement asset is why. We're adding the deal to the Catalyst Tracker as a Korea partnership with "settlement asset unknown," and watching the $1 level on the Dashboard.
Sources: CoinDesk: XRP sinks below $1 as Korean bank adopts Ripple Payments · Cointelegraph: Jeonbuk Bank taps Ripple Payments · Ripple on X · CoinGecko XRP history · XRP Insights ETF flows
Price is CoinGecko's daily snapshot at 00:00 UTC on August 18, 2026; intraday low per CoinDesk. ETF flows through August 17.
Not investment advice. See our Disclaimer.
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