Important Ripple News and XRP Price Update: October 8

The past week or so has been quite eventful for the broader Ripple and XRP ecosystem, with new partnerships and developments concerning both the company and the underlying asset behind it. We will review the key points in this article and outline some reasons behind the native token’s price slump. But before we dive into XRP’s price moves, let’s examine some of the big news coming this week. Ripple strengthened its partnership with the Wall Street giant Brevan Howard by enhancing access to multi-asset prime brokerage amid rising demand and integrated investment infrastructure. Ripple Prime will streamline operations for the Wall Street entity across several asset classes, including traditional and crypto, to improve capital efficiency. The collaboration follows Ripple’s $500 million investment round in 2025, in which Brevan Howard was among the participants, marking a significant evolution in their relationship post-SEC settlement. The second piece of major macro news comes from the other side of the world, South Korea. Meritz Securities partnered with Ripple to improve its digital asset infrastructure in the country, focusing on custody and tokenization. The agreement aims to align with the evolving local market and regulatory landscape and follows Ripple’s broader expansion in Korea, including deals with K Bank and Kyobo Life Insurance. Ripple’s native stablecoin, which saw the light of day in December 2024, has picked up the pace lately in terms of market cap and utilization. Following the launch of Ripple Mint, a platform allowing institutional customers a single way to access, mint, redeem, and manage the stablecoin, its adoption rate has increased significantly. This led to RLUSD crossing a major milestone, with its market cap climbing above $2.5 billion. RLUSD is the 40th-largest cryptocurrency by this metric, and the eighth-largest in its stablecoin niche, closing down the gap to PayPal USD (PYUSD), with a current market cap of $2.88B. Separately, demand for XRP through the exchange-traded funds tracking its performance fell 94% week over week, as reported over the weekend. The inflows dropped from over $75.5 million to under $4.75 million during the past full couple of weeks. The ongoing one has not seen any improvement, as the funds have seen only one day in the green ($3.14 million) and two days with no reportable data. Heading into the business week, the underlying asse