Ripple lands a Korean bank as Seoul moves to block Polymarket

South Korean regulators approved Ripple’s integration with the country’s banking system on the same day a media watchdog voted to cut off access to the prediction market Polymarket. 

South Korean regulators have joined a widening crackdown against Polymarket while approving Ripple’s partnership with Jeonbuk Bank. 

Jeonbuk Bank is Ripple’s first regional lender in Korea

Ripple (XRP) has announced that Jeonbuk Bank will run cross-border business remittances over Ripple Payments, making it the first regional lender in the country to adopt the service. 

Traditional transfers have to be routed between intermediary banks on the SWIFT network, and this process can make transactions take days to clear. However, Ripple offers a route that settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock. The service is aimed at the bank’s importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators. 

Jeonbuk is Ripple’s third Korean partnership of 2026, following a tokenized government-bond trial with Kyobo Life Insurance and a custody and wallet deal with internet-only Kbank. 

Despite these partnership announcements, XRP slipped under $1 to 98 cents in Asian morning trading on Tuesday, its weakest level since November 2024 and the worst performer among major coins over the day and week. 

The decline might be due to RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, which now does much of the institutional settlement work. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth roughly $1.38 billion, and $845 million of that is RLUSD, representing more than three-fifths of the total value. 

RLUSD’s circulating supply reached approximately 1.71 billion tokens, with a market capitalization of around $1.71 billion. Ripple minted another 10 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger on August 17. 

Despite the drop in XRP’s price, traders are still leaning long, with futures open interest near $2.78 billion. 

Is Polymarket a legal platform in South Korea?

On the same day that the Ripple deal advanced, the Korea Media and Communications Standards Commission voted to block domestic access to Polymarket, stating that the platform facilitates gambling under the Criminal Act and the National Sports Promotion Act. 

The commission explained that because payouts hinge on events users cannot control and winners take the entire pot, the design “fuels gambling psychology.” It also noted the fact that Polymarket sets the markets, runs the settlement rails, and collects trading fees. 

Polymarket argued it had removed Korean-language services and won-denominated payments and therefore fell outside Korean law, but the regulator rejected that, saying technical features cannot exempt a platform providing “a real illegal gambling environment to domestic users.”

Cryptopolitan has been tracking the situation since the Korean police opened the country’s first criminal investigation into local Polymarket bettors after heavy trading around the June 3 national election. The commission began deliberations on July 6 after referrals from the National Police Agency. 

Beyond Korea, more than 30 countries, including Italy, Indonesia and Argentina have blocked or limited Polymarket.

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