XRP Ledger Chosen for New BIS Data Verification Prototype

TLDR

• The Bank for International Settlements published a working paper on September 2, 2026, describing a blockchain system built on the XRP Ledger.
• The system creates cryptographic fingerprints of official datasets and anchors them on-chain so users can verify data has not been altered.
• The prototype achieved 3-5 second publication times and 1-2 second verification times with very low costs.
• This was tested on XRPL’s DevNet, not the live mainnet, and the full code was released as open source.
• XRP was trading at $1.37 at the time of publication, up 1.42% over 24 hours but down 2.40% over the past week.

The Bank for International Settlements has published a working paper describing a blockchain tool meant to protect official economic data from tampering. The research was built and tested on the XRP Ledger.

The paper, numbered 1374, came out on September 2, 2026. It tackles a problem with how international organizations share financial data.

Most groups use a data format called SDMX to publish economic statistics. That format has no built-in way to check if a file has been changed after it was released.

Governments, researchers, and AI systems pull this data regularly. If a third party alters a file, even by accident, there is currently no fast way to catch it.

How the System Works

The BIS team designed a fix using cryptography. Each dataset gets a unique digital fingerprint called a hash.

Thousands of these fingerprints can be combined into one summary value known as a Merkle root. That root then gets recorded on the XRP Ledger, where it is timestamped and cannot be edited.

The published data file also carries a signed credential linked to the publisher’s identity. This lets users confirm both who released the data and whether it has changed.

All of this can be checked with a single lookup on the ledger. Only the fingerprints go on-chain, not the actual data, so sensitive information stays private.

The prototype delivered publication times of 3 to 5 seconds and verification times of 1 to 2 seconds. On-chain costs were described as very low, and one ledger entry can cover thousands of datasets at once.

BIS released the full codebase as open source, allowing other institutions to review or build on the work.

XRP Price and Market Context

This paper adds to a growing list of institutional projects built on the XRP Ledger. JPMorgan, Ripple, Mastercard, and Ondo recently completed a tokenized Treasury settlement on the same network in about four seconds.

Other recent developments include RLUSD stablecoin supply passing Ethereum on XRPL, new ETF products, and a live XRP listing through OSL Hong Kong.

At the time of publication, XRP was trading at $1.37. The token gained 1.42% over the past 24 hours, with $2.46 billion in trading volume during that period.

XRP’s market cap stood near $85.7 billion, based on a circulating supply of 63 billion tokens. Over the past seven days, the price was down 2.40%.

It is worth repeating that this project ran on XRPL’s DevNet, a testing environment. It is not a sign that BIS has adopted the XRP Ledger for live central bank operations.

Community members on social media platform X discussed the paper after it was released. Some highlighted the technical details, while others pointed out that this remains a research prototype rather than a deployed system.

The BIS paper does not confirm any use of XRP tokens for settlement. It focuses only on using the ledger’s infrastructure to timestamp and verify data.

For now, the project stands as one more example of institutions testing the XRP Ledger for specific technical tasks, separate from the token’s trading activity.

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