Bank for International Settlements uses XRP Ledger for on-chain verification proof-of-concept

The Bank for International Settlements, the institution that coordinates monetary policy among the world’s central banks, just published a working paper that uses the XRP Ledger to verify the authenticity of official statistics. Working Paper No. 1374, released on September 2, describes a proof-of-concept system that anchors cryptographic fingerprints of economic datasets on XRPL, letting anyone independently confirm that published data hasn’t been tampered with. What the BIS actually built The current standard for exchanging official statistics between institutions is called SDMX, or Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange. It works fine for moving data around, but it has a blind spot: there’s no built-in cryptographic mechanism to verify that the data you received is the same data that was originally published, or that the publisher is who they claim to be. The BIS prototype fills that gap. When a statistical dataset is published, the system generates a SHA3-512 hash of the data, organizes these hashes into a Merkle tree structure, and then anchors the resulting fingerprint on the XRP Ledger. It also creates a W3C Verifiable Credential for each dataset, which handles publisher aut...