Something unusual is playing out on the Korean crypto market this week, where XRP has moved into a dominant position across both Upbit and Bithumb, according to CoinMarketCap. Trading activity around the token has surged, pushing volumes well past those of Tether and even Bitcoin and Ethereum.
With a daily trading volume of $351 million, XRP led the board on Upbit with a 14.84% market share, comfortably ahead of Ethereum, Bitcoin and USDT. Over on Bithumb, XRP topped the list again with $151.6 million in volume, surpassing USDT and doubling Bitcoin’s numbers. So, XRP's presence is hard to miss.
Much of this appears to be driven by retail momentum. After climbing from $2.14 to $2.48 in a short span, the volume spike followed quickly. In the past couple of days, XRP trading on Upbit surpassed both ETH and BTC in volume. Within 24 hours, the combined Korean markets saw over $1.2 billion in XRP volume.
XRP takes over Korea
Futures markets are following the same trend with a 41.6% increase in open interest on XRP contracts this week, bringing the total to $3.42 billion. Furthermore, liquidity metrics are showing signs of concentrated demand.
For example, on Upbit, the +2% bid depth for XRP is $929,000, while the -2% ask depth is $3.72 million. Similarly, Bithumb shows $1.27 million in bid depth and $1.98 million in ask depth, placing XRP ahead of most major tokens in terms of active market depth.
In addition, the XRP token recently surpassed USDT to claim third place in the global market cap rankings, achieving 4.47% total market dominance.
As retail interest rises and futures positioning grows quickly, XRP's performance in Korea stands out this week, not only in price, but also in behavior across spot and derivative markets.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin