Four Korean Banks Join Ripple on Stage at XRP Seoul as Attendance Tops 5,000

Seoul Panel Puts Four Banks Next to Ripple

XRP took the main stage in Seoul on Saturday as Kbank, Kyobo Securities, Woori Bank and Jeonbuk Bank shared a single panel with Ripple at the One XRP Seoul forum, part of the XRP Seoul 2026 conference held at the Grand Hyatt Seoul during Korea Blockchain Week. The session, titled “From Cross-Border Payments to Tokenized Deposits,” billed Ripple President Monica Long and RippleX senior vice president Markus Infanger alongside the bank delegates. For three of the four institutions, the appearance built on arrangements already signed this year; Woori, the exception, has announced no Ripple deal, which makes its seat on the panel the freshest signal of the day. A photograph posted by Hussein Zangana, the XRP Ledger Foundation director known in the community as Vet, shows the four bank representatives seated together on stage, with the session’s slides visible behind them. Turnout was the other number of note: the organizers’ official account counted more than 5,000 attendees, up from more than 3,000 at the 2025 edition. Last year’s gathering drew its crowd while the XRP price hovered around $1.49, a level our earlier analysis mapped to a 2023 setup that preceded a 61% rally. Organizers had placed tokenization at the center of this year’s program well in advance, and the session’s title kept to that brief. Korean banks have spent 2026 running pilots with several crypto vendors, and a shared stage is the most public confirmation yet of how far those conversations have come. None of the four used the slot to announce new terms; the news was the seating chart itself: an internet-only bank, a brokerage, one of Korea’s big-four lenders and a regional bank, all publicly aligned with Ripple’s program for one afternoon.

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Shows the four bank representatives seated together on stage.

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Where Each Bank Stands with Ripple

Each institution arrives with a different ledger. Kbank, the online-only bank, is the exclusive banking partner of Upbit, the South Korean crypto exchange, and that relationship helped push its user base from roughly 2 million in 2020 to 15 million by the end of 2025. Kbank signed a cooperation agreement with Ripple in April, validated a remittance system built into its wallet application, and has entered a second phase that uses Ripple’s Palisade wallet software to test on-chain transfers to countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Thailand. Kyobo Securities arrives through its group: Kyobo Life Insurance partnered with Ripple in April to tokenize government bond settlement via Ripple Custody, a pilot meant to replace settlement cycles that normally take two days with near-real-time completion, and one participating brokerage has said the discussion has widened beyond the insurer’s own balance sheet. That timing sits against a policy calendar, since South Korea plans to open its market to tokenized stocks and bonds in 2027. Woori Bank is the outlier. It has announced no Ripple arrangement, and four days before XRP Seoul it signed with MoonPay, focused on KRW-pegged stablecoins and cross-border corporate payments. Sharing a stage with Ripple while tied to a competing vendor suggests Korean banks are negotiating with several providers in parallel rather than acting on FOMO. Jeonbuk Bank, by contrast, has chosen: in August it became the first regional bank in South Korea to deploy Ripple Payments, the third Ripple collaboration with a Korean institution this year, and Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia-Pacific, said at the time that the bank is extending near-real-time cross-border settlement directly to the businesses it serves. The token itself slipped 3.7% over the past 24 hours, and the levels traders are watching next are laid out in our XRP technical analysis.

From 3,000 to 5,000 in a Year

In our reading, the companies’ own announcements trace how far the relationship has moved through 2026: Kbank’s April cooperation agreement and its UAE and Thailand remittance pilot, Kyobo Life Insurance’s April Ripple Custody pilot for government bond settlement, and Jeonbuk Bank’s August Ripple Payments rollout all come from the parties’ own disclosures, as does the quarter in which our coverage shows Ripple’s RLUSD added $765.3 million in Q3. What none of those documents provides is commercial detail: fees, projected volumes or go-live dates, and Woori Bank sits outside Ripple’s signed roster altogether. Venue access for the token is tracked in our Best Crypto Exchanges guide. For an altcoin whose adoption case runs through bank rails rather than retail apps, the jump from a 3,000-person crowd to a 5,000-person one in a single year is the clearest measure of where the Seoul relationship now stands.