The Bank for International Settlements built and tested a system that anchors cryptographic fingerprints of official economic statistics on the XRP Ledger, according to working paper 1374 published on September 2.
The paper, titled “Verifiable official statistics: a blockchain-based approach,” comes from five authors: Mario Rusev of d-fine Austria and four BIS researchers, Rafael Schmidt, Edward Lambe, Christian Schmieder and Glenn Philip Tice. It addresses a gap in SDMX, the international standard used to exchange official statistics. The BIS, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the World Bank and the ILO all rely on SDMX, but the standard offers no native way to prove where a downloaded file came from or that it has not changed since publication.
The system the authors built closes that gap. Each published dataset gets a cryptographic fingerprint computed with SHA3-512 hashing. Multiple fingerprints are grouped into a Merkle tree, and the root value of that tree is written into a transaction memo on the XRP Ledger, where it is timestamped and cannot be altered afterward. Anyone who downloads a dataset can recompute the fingerprint and compare it against the ledger record to confirm the file is the one the publisher released.
Only the fingerprints go on-chain. The underlying statistics stay off-chain, which preserves confidentiality and lets a single ledger entry cover thousands of datasets at once. A signed W3C Verifiable Credential carried inside the SDMX message identifies the publisher, with the signing key bound to the publisher’s XRPL address through an on-chain attestation registry. Verification takes one to two seconds, per the paper’s own measurements.
Why the XRP Ledger
The authors chose XRPL for practical reasons. Its base fee of 10 drops, roughly 0.00001 XRP per anchoring transaction, made per-release anchoring effectively free. Its three to four second ledger close gave a predictable publication rhythm, and the memo field approach required no smart contracts, which removed contract risk and gas costs from the design entirely.
The team ran the pipeline against real BIS statistical structures. Their worked example used a message from BIS consolidated banking statistics, a dataflow that tracks cross-border bank exposures across reporting countries. The test file carried three reporting countries with 12 quarterly observations each. Median publication times in the prototype were three to five seconds.
“A particular type of blockchain, the XRP Ledger, has been used as a proof of concept because of its low nominal fees, fast consensus finality, availability of developer resources and technical analysis of the consensus protocol,” the BIS said when the paper was published.
Research prototype, not an endorsement
The paper is explicit about its limits. It states that this is a research prototype, not production infrastructure, and that using XRPL as a testbed does not indicate the BIS has adopted the network for official operations. It also does not engage with XRP as an asset in any capacity. Every anchoring transaction carried a minimal, fixed value of 10 drops solely to satisfy the network’s requirement for ledger acceptance. The token functioned as a transaction cost, not as something being tracked, exchanged or referenced by the system.
The reference implementation is public. The code sits under an Apache 2.0 licence through BIS Open Tech, the BIS platform for sharing statistical and financial software as public goods, and through the SDMX community site.
What the paper points to next
The authors describe the anchoring layer as interchangeable and discuss mirroring anchors across multiple chains for redundancy. The paper proposes Chainlink integration to carry verified statistics onto other chains. It flags zero-knowledge proofs as a route to checking statistical properties without revealing the figures themselves, and it calls for standard verification protocols for AI agents reading official data, so autonomous systems can confirm a dataset’s provenance before acting on it.
The authors also point to XRPL’s EVM-compatible sidechain as a natural next step, which would let data anchoring and smart contract execution share one ledger.
What it means for XRPL
For the XRP Ledger, the paper adds an institutional use case at a moment when the network’s activity metrics are mixed. Blockworks’ State of XRP report counted 222.4 million transactions in the second quarter of 2026, the second-highest quarterly total in the ledger’s history, though failed transactions rose to 24.5 percent of the total and daily active addresses fell 10.7 percent quarter over quarter. Native stablecoin supply on the ledger climbed 195 percent during the quarter to $825.5 million, driven mainly by Ripple’s RLUSD.
Real-world asset value tracked on the ledger currently sits near $1.3 billion, with stablecoins making up about 85 percent of it and tokenized treasuries, led by Ondo Finance’s OUSG, accounting for most of the rest.
The BIS work is also a data point in a broader pattern of institutions testing public blockchain rails without committing to them. Central banks have run similar experiments on other networks and quietly shelved them. The paper itself says the anchoring layer is designed to be portable, so nothing in the design ties the BIS to XRPL specifically. Whether any statistical agency adopts the approach in production depends on the same factors the authors optimized for: cost, finality and the absence of smart contract risk.
XRP traded near $1.40 this week and the story circulated widely in XRP communities after aggregator accounts resurfaced it, but the paper’s own framing is the one that matters: research does not equal endorsement. The document was published three weeks ago and the market reaction this week reflects rediscovery, not a new commitment from the BIS.