The Bank for International Settlements, the institution above the world’s central banks, has published a working paper describing a blockchain-based system designed to make official economic data tamper-proof.
Researchers built and tested the proof of concept on the XRP Ledger. This is research, not a production rollout.
What BIS Actually Built on the XRP Ledger
BIS Working Paper No. 1374, published on September 2, 2026, addresses a real gap. International bodies publish financial and economic datasets using a standard called SDMX.
That format has no built-in way for users to confirm that a downloaded file still matches the original version. Governments and AI systems regularly pull this data.
If a third-party portal alters the numbers, even accidentally, there is currently no quick way to catch it.
The BIS team built a solution. Each dataset gets a cryptographic fingerprint, a unique hash. Thousands of fingerprints can be bundled into a single summary value, called a Merkle root.
That root gets anchored on the XRP Ledger, where it is timestamped and cannot be changed. The published file itself carries a digitally signed credential tied to the publisher’s identity.
A user can verify both who released the data and whether it has been altered, using just one ledger lookup.
The prototype delivered a median publication time of 3–5 seconds and a verification time of 1–2 seconds. On-chain costs were negligible. One ledger entry can cover thousands of datasets.
Only fingerprints, never the underlying data, go on-chain, so confidentiality is preserved. The entire codebase was released as open source.
Ripple partner SBI has already participated in earlier BIS-adjacent infrastructure work, as CoinGape reported when SBI confirmed its role in BIS Project Agora. That context matters: the XRP Ledger is no stranger to high-level institutional research environments.
Why Investors Should Pay Attention, and What They Should Not Overread
This paper sits next to a growing stack of institutional XRP Ledger use cases.
JPMorgan, Ripple, Mastercard, and Ondo recently completed what CoinGape covered as a four-second tokenized Treasury settlement on XRPL.
That pilot and the BIS paper share the same engineering logic: low fees, fast finality, and a ledger that institutional teams can actually build on.
XRPL’s institutional credibility has continued to grow. Demand from RWA tokenization, ETFs, and custody is converging at once, as CoinGape detailed when reporting on XRPL’s growing institutional demand stack.
The BIS data-integrity layer adds one more use case to that stack, this time in the official statistics space.
XRP is trading at $1.37 at the time of publication. The token posted a 1.42% gain in the last 24 hours, with a 24-hour trading volume of $2.46 billion.
Its current market cap stands at approximately $85.7 billion, based on a circulating supply of 63 billion XRP. The weekly picture is softer, with XRP down 2.40% over the past seven days.
That said, the caveats are important. The tests ran on XRPL DevNet, not mainnet. This is a proof of concept. It is not an announcement that BIS has adopted XRPL as official infrastructure, nor that XRP is being used for central-bank settlement.
Community voices on X were quick to flag both the significance and the limits. Analyst @InvestWithD broke down the paper in a thread.
🚨UPDATE: The Bank for International Settlements OFFICIALLY Used $XRP Ledger For a Blockchain Proof of Concept 🤯🌍🔥
The Bank for International Settlements (@BIS_org) just PUBLISHED Working Paper No. 1374, detailing a blockchain-based system for making official economic and… https://t.co/FwcrcwsZFE pic.twitter.com/equqsubgjl
— Diana (@InvestWithD) September 3, 2026
Also, CryptoIG_ noted the DevNet caveat in a separate facts-over-hype thread.
🚨Today- BIS and the XRPL:
The Bank for International Settlements — the central bank for central banks — just published a working paper testing the XRP Ledger.
Not a partnership. Not an announcement. A research paper, published today.
Working Paper No. 1374: “Verifiable…
— Crypto Investment Group (@CryptoIG_) September 3, 2026
The accurate read: BIS researchers chose XRPL to prototype a public integrity layer for official statistics, released the method, and published the code.
For investors, this is optionality on institutional credibility, not a standalone catalyst.
As regards live rails, we have seen RLUSD now surpassing Ethereum in stablecoin supply on XRPL, expanding ETF wrappers.
Also, the ProShares XRP ETF series now registered, and regulated retail access through OSL Hong Kong’s live XRP listing. Together, those are the rails. The BIS paper is the credibility layer above them.
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