The Bank for International Settlements built and tested a new verification system. It anchors official economic and banking statistics on the XRP Ledger. Working paper 1374 documents the design, the code, and the test results. The BIS published it on September 2, 2026. Mario Rusev of d-fine Austria wrote it with four BIS authors. They are Rafael Schmidt, Edward Lambe, Christian Schmieder, and Glenn Philip Tice.
BREAKING: The Bank for International Settlements just built and tested a system to anchor government economic and banking data on XRP Ledger.
— King Solomon (Ryan Solomon) (@IOV_OWL) September 2, 2026
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What the BIS Built
The system gives statistical agencies a way to prove published data is genuine. Each release receives a cryptographic fingerprint, and the XRP Ledger stores that fingerprint permanently. Anyone can then check a downloaded file against the ledger record. Importantly, the underlying data never touches the chain. Only the fingerprint does, so confidentiality holds throughout.
The BIS built this around SDMX, the standard it uses to exchange official statistics. The ECB, IMF, OECD, World Bank, and ILO rely on SDMX as well. However, SDMX offers no native way to prove where a file originated. The BIS closed that gap by making the XRP Ledger a public notary. As the paper puts it, no single institution can then edit the record silently.
The Banking and Economic Data at the Center of the Test
The team ran the pipeline against real BIS statistical structures. Their worked example uses a message from BIS consolidated banking statistics. That dataflow tracks cross-border bank exposures across reporting countries. The test file carried three reporting countries with 12 quarterly observations each. The system fingerprinted the whole file and each country series separately, so publishers can anchor one series, a subset, or an entire release.
For broader benchmarks, the team generated a corpus from BIS public structure definitions. Those files ranged from 10 KB up to 8 MB, spanning a few series to several thousand. Every test run used the XRP Ledger DevNet. DevNet shares mainnet’s transaction format and ledger close cadence, so the latency figures carry over directly. Mainnet fees differ slightly, yet they stay in the sub-cent range.
How the XRP Ledger Anchors Each Release
The mechanics stay lightweight by design. The backend strips old anchor tags, then normalizes the file with Canonical XML 1.1. Next it hashes the result with SHA3-512, at both whole-file and per-series level. Those hashes become leaves in a domain-separated Merkle tree that collapses into one root. The gateway then writes that root into the Memos field of an XRPL Payment transaction.
That transaction carries just 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, enough to win ledger acceptance. The system then rewrites the SDMX file header to hold the anchor, ordered Merkle leaves, and a Verifiable Credential. An onchain attestation registry binds the publisher’s identity key to its XRPL address. Consequently, a user verifies a file with the file itself plus one ledger lookup. No call to the publisher’s own servers is required.
Why the BIS Ran It on the XRP Ledger
Cost and simplicity drove the choice. The memo approach needs no smart contracts, so the BIS avoided gas costs and contract risk. XRPL’s base fee of 10 drops made per-release anchoring effectively free. Its three to four second ledger close also set a predictable publication rhythm. The authors describe the anchoring layer as interchangeable, and they discuss mirroring anchors across chains for redundancy.
Even so, the XRP Ledger is the chain they built on, tested on, and shipped code for. That code now sits in public under an Apache 2.0 licence through BIS Open Tech. The paper also points to XRPL’s EVM-compatible sidechain as a natural next step. That route would let data anchoring and smart contract execution share one ledger.
Speed and Cost Results From the Test
The prototype ran on a single developer workstation using a Docker stack. Median publication latency landed between three and five seconds, set mainly by XRPL ledger close. Verification finished in one to two seconds per dataset. Proof and hash metadata added only one to two kilobytes per dataset. Verification also scales logarithmically with batch size, so proofs stay compact as volumes climb.
Batching makes the economics nearly disappear. One transaction covers an entire batch, whatever its size. With 1,000 datasets batched, onchain cost drops to three billionths of a dollar each. Processing and storage then dominate, at roughly half a cent per dataset. Above about 50 datasets per batch, ledger fees stop mattering at all.
What This Opens Up for XRPL
The authors look past statistics publishing toward tokenized markets. They argue the payoff grows when verified data sits on the same ledger as digital assets. Inflation-linked products, perpetual futures, and derivative settlement all appear as candidates. A contract could confirm an inflation print is authentic before releasing a payment. Additionally, the paper proposes Chainlink integration to carry verified statistics onto other chains.
AI agents receive similar treatment. The authors want standard verification protocols for autonomous systems reading official data. They also flag zero-knowledge proofs for checking statistical properties without revealing the figures.
Where the Prototype Stops
The BIS frames this as a proof of concept rather than a live service. Production use would require HSM-backed signing, pinned validator nodes, and formal load testing. The ledger also certifies only what was published, by whom, and when. Publishers stay responsible for whether the numbers themselves are correct. Finally, the views expressed belong to the authors rather than the BIS or its member central banks.
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