BIS Tests XRP Ledger for Anchoring Official Statistics On-Chain
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has published a working paper that explores the use of XRP Ledger to anchor official statistics on-chain. The proof-of-concept study, titled Working Paper No 1374, seeks to determine how statistical agencies can provide users with an independent way to verify the origin and integrity of published data without modifying their existing dissemination systems.
The BIS relies on the SDMX standard to exchange official statistics with other international organizations. The prototype developed in this study binds each SDMX dataset to its source by hashing it and writing a single summary value to the ledger. However, only the fingerprints reach the chain, while the underlying numbers remain off-ledger, ensuring confidential data stays secure.
The system uses Canonical XML 1.1 to normalize each file, hashes it with SHA3-512 at the whole-file and per-series level, and collapses those hashes into one Merkle root written to the Memos field of an XRPL Payment transaction. Each file also carries a W3C Verifiable Credential in its header, signed by the publisher’s identity keys.
The memo approach avoids gas costs and contract risk, with anchoring coming close to being free due to XRPL’s base fee of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP. Batching compounds this, allowing a single ledger entry to cover thousands of datasets, dropping the on-chain cost to a fraction of a cent each.
The paper also cites the ledger’s fast consensus finality and published technical analysis of its consensus protocol. This study is part of a larger effort by XRPL to take on institutional workloads, with previous pilots linking the ledger to interbank rails with JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo, settling tokenized Treasury bills in under five seconds.
The BIS tests ran on XRPL’s DevNet, a test network that shares the mainnet’s transaction format and close cadence. The latency figures carry over, and mainnet fees remain in the sub-cent range. However, the build is described as an experimental proof-of-concept, requiring hardware-backed signing, pinned validator nodes, and formal load testing for production.