BIS Tests XRP Ledger for Verifiable Official Statistics in Blockchain Research

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has tested the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to make official statistics easier to verify.

The researchers created a system that uses blockchain technology to link statistical data to the organization that published it. This lets governments, banks, and automated systems verify that the data is authentic and hasn’t been changed. Notably, the team tested the system on the XRP Ledger’s development network.

The project addresses a trust problem with official statistics. Organizations commonly use SDMX to share data, but users often have no independent way to confirm that the data came from the claimed organization or remained unchanged after publication.

The BIS system first creates a unique digital fingerprint, called a hash, for each statistical dataset. It can also fingerprint individual data series for more detailed verification.

The hashes are then combined into a Merkle tree, which produces one final fingerprint for a group of datasets. The system records this final fingerprint on the XRP Ledger with a timestamp. Once recorded on the ledger, it cannot be changed.

The original data stays off the blockchain. Instead, the published file contains the information needed to verify its fingerprint and confirm who published it. Users can calculate the file’s fingerprint and compare it with the fingerprint stored on XRPL.

This allows the system to prove that the data has not changed without putting the actual data on the blockchain.

In testing, the BIS system took about 3–5 seconds to publish the fingerprint and 1–2 seconds to verify the data. The results show that blockchain-based verification is fast enough for interactive applications and automated systems.

The research has attracted attention from the XRP and XRPL community.

XRPL validator Vet highlighted the BIS prototype’s use of the XRP Ledger’s memo field. He said the experiment demonstrates that XRPL’s public and immutable design has uses beyond conventional payments.

Vet also discussed using NFTs to store data fingerprints more permanently. NFTs remain on the ledger and can link to external storage systems such as IPFS or Arweave.

This is very interesting!

The Bank of International Settlement used in their research paper the XRP Ledger (dev net) for its immutability and public verifiable properties!

So what did they do? Spoiler, they used the memo field, i suggest to use something else at the end.

The… pic.twitter.com/mtFdiTCiqW

— Vet (@Vet_X0) September 2, 2026

Crypto Eri also highlighted the experiment, explaining that the BIS placed a digital fingerprint of an official statistics file on the XRP Ledger. This gives users a way to check whether the file changed after publication.

The BIS research applies beyond SDMX datasets. The system is data-format agnostic and supports other structured data formats, including XBRL, which is widely used for financial and regulatory reporting.

The researchers also analyzed the costs of using the blockchain. Because a single XRPL transaction can represent thousands of datasets, the cost of recording data fingerprints becomes negligible when datasets are grouped into appropriately sized batches. Processing and storage remain the larger costs.

The system is still a proof of concept, not a production-ready product. However, the experiment demonstrates that XRPL provides a practical way for institutions to prove that financial, statistical, and regulatory data is authentic.

For XRP holders, the development is another institutional use case for the XRP Ledger. If blockchain-based verification systems move from research into production, public ledgers such as XRPL will become part of the infrastructure used to establish trust in financial, statistical, and regulatory data.