A working paper from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is testing the
THE Working Paper No. 1374 essentially asks how statistical agencies can provide users with an independent means of verifying the origin and integrity of published data without modifying their existing dissemination systems.
International organizations (including the BIS) rely on the SDMX standard to exchange official statistics, and the prototype links each SDMX dataset to its source by hashing it and writing a unique summary value to the ledger.
Although only fingerprints reach the chain, never the underlying numbers, confidential data remains off-ledger and the method extends to formats such as XBRL. The BIS has already tested public blockchains, including Project Mariana, which tested central bank wholesale digital currency settlement on a public chain with the central banks of France, Singapore and Switzerland.
The system normalizes each file with Canonical XML 1.1, hashes it with SHA3-512 at the entire file level and per series, and aggregates these hashes into a single Merkle root written in the Memos field of an XRPL payment transaction. Each file also carries a verifiable W3C identifier in its header, signed by the publisher’s identity keys.
Cost and simplicity
The memo approach requires no smart contracts, so the authors avoided gas costs and contractual risks, and XRPL’s base fee of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, makes pegging almost free. Batch processing makes this up.
A single registry entry can span thousands of data sets, bringing the on-chain cost down to a fraction of a cent each. The document also cites the finality of the ledger’s rapid consensus and published technical analysis of its consensus protocol.
XRPL has taken on other institutional workloads this year. CryptoPotato reported on a pilot project connecting ledger to interbank rails with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo, which settled tokenized Treasuries in less than five seconds, and Ripple released an institutional roadmap adding compliance credentials and permitted exchanges. BIS tests were run on XRPL’s DevNet, a test network.
He notes that DevNet shares the mainnet’s transaction format and close cadence, so latency figures are retained and mainnet fees remain under a penny.
Some firm limits
The document also describes the release as an experimental proof of concept, indicating that a production service would need a hardware signature, pinned validation nodes, and formal load testing.
However, keep in mind that the ledger only certifies what was published, by whom and when, so the document does not make any adoption decisions or give any endorsement of XRP, and the authors attribute their opinions to themselves, not to the BIS or its member central banks.
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