Key Takeaways
- Ripple said that it is no longer involved in a BIS cross-border payments task force that it originally joined in 2023.
- The BIS said its XRPL paper is not an endorsement, but key questions about the network’s selection remain unanswered.
- Ripple holds billions in XRP and has commercial interests tied to XRPL adoption.
As previously reported by Bitcoin.com News, on Sept. 2, the BIS published research describing a prototype data-verification system built on the XRP Ledger and tested on XRPL DevNet, a fee-free test network. The authors looked into how quickly XRPL could anchor and verify data.
Per the paper, this blockchain was used as a “proof of concept” because of its low fees, fast finality, available developer resources, and existing technical analysis of its consensus protocol. For this, the research cites a 2018 paper written by two Ripple researchers.
Ripple’s Stakes in XRP and XRPL
The XRP Ledger was launched by a team of engineers in 2012, and the company that became Ripple was founded that same year. One of those engineers, Jed McCaleb, co-founded Ripple, and another, David Schwartz, later became its CTO. Now the company has a commercial interest in XRPL’s adoption, as it holds tens of billions of XRP, builds products on the XRPL and uses the token in payment services.
In 2020, Garlinghouse admitted that the company “would not be profitable or cash flow positive [without selling XRP].” In either case, Ripple hasn’t published its financial results. In March 2026, the company was reportedly valued at $50 billion during a share buyback, or 25% more than in a funding round in November 2025. Meanwhile, per XRP Insights, Ripple holds 31.98 billion XRP ($48 billion worth), or 32% of the supply, in escrow alone.
XRP is down around 59% from its all-time high price of $3.65, reached in July 2025.
Immutable Ledger With Missing History
The BIS working paper describes XRPL as an immutable ledger for anchoring dataset fingerprints, providing timestamped, tamper-evident commitments. However, XRPL’s own history complicates the idea of a permanent, always-on record. For example, the developers of the blockchain admit that “the first two weeks or so of ledger history was lost due to a bug in the server at the time.”
According to XRPL’s documentation, the network kept running without the missing history because each ledger version records the full current state. The blockchain also experienced technical hiccups that would complicate the recording of new data fingerprints or disrupt lookups of old ones.
For example, in September 2024, XRPL had to fix a bug that caused full-history nodes to run out of database space. Then, in November 2024, several nodes crashed, and new transactions paused for about 10 minutes. A few months later, on Feb. 4, 2025, XRPL halted block production for about an hour, although no user funds were lost.
Why Not Other Blockchains?
Bitcoin.com News reached out to Mario Rusev and Rafael Schmidt, two of the five co-authors of the paper, asking how XRPL’s technical problems affected their decision to choose this blockchain—and why other, more decentralized and prominent blockchains, such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, weren’t picked for testing. Bitcoin, for example, is already used for data timestamping through Opentimestamps, an open-source protocol.
The paper rates XRPL ahead of Ethereum on speed and cost, but its tests ran only on a test network. Also, according to its cost model, fees become largely irrelevant once data is batched. Popular networks that are also known for speed and low fees but considered less decentralized, such as Stellar (also co-founded by McCaleb), Algorand, Solana, Hedera, or others, are not mentioned in the paper at all. What’s more, Hedera is already known for its timestamping capabilities.
As for decentralization, at the time of writing, XRPscan showed 192 XRPL validators, which included a default trusted list of about 35 validators, with one operated by Ripple.com. Per Token Terminal data, Ethereum had more than 882,000 validators (however, hundreds of operators can run thousands of validators each), while its closest competitor according to this measure was Cardano, with 2,900 validators.
Neither Rusev nor Schmidt has responded to Bitcoin.com News’ repeated requests for comment.
The Consultancy Behind the Paper
According to the paper, Rusev, who was listed first among the authors, works for d-fine Austria GmbH, a consultancy, while the other authors work at the BIS. Germany-headquartered d-fine says that, since 2016, it has helped its “clients in the design and implementation of blockchain and digital asset-related topics in over 50 projects.”
In a 2024 paper on cross-border payments, d-fine compared SWIFT gpi, Ripple and NEXUS solutions, writing that Ripple’s market penetration is low, while transaction speed is “near real-time.” Rusev wasn’t among the authors of that paper.
D-fine hasn’t responded to Bitcoin.com News’ repeated requests for comment, including whether the company has any commercial or other relationships, or has had any in the past, with Ripple. Ripple itself responded that “currently” it isn’t involved in any partnerships with d-fine.
Not an Endorsement of XRPL
Meanwhile, a BIS spokesperson replied that BIS policy is not to comment on the merits of individual companies or providers.
“Research or exploratory project work should not be taken as an endorsement of any commercial entity or approach,” the spokesperson said.
The paper indeed emphasizes that the views are those of the authors, not the BIS itself, despite Garlinghouse framing it as “BIS is testing with XRPL.” Also, the authors claim that their “approach is meant to be blockchain-agnostic and to work with solutions other than XRPL, as well.” In the long-term operational risks section, the authors also discuss a scenario in which “XRPL becomes unavailable, prohibitively expensive, or politically unsuitable.” In those cases, “the anchoring component can be re-pointed at another ledger.”
Ripple’s Term at the BIS Task Force Has Ended
Ripple had been a member of the Cross-border Payments Interoperability and Extension (PIE) task force at the BIS since 2023, and was also mentioned in its report in February 2026. The report on expanding access to payment systems doesn’t mention XRP or XRPL. It mentions Ripple, specifically Rene Huijsen, director of operations at the XRP Ledger Foundation, only in the “Composition of Cross-border Payments Interoperability and Extension (PIE) Task Team 1 – Subgroup 1” section.
However, as the composition of the task force has been updated, the company is no longer on the list. The task force advises on market conventions and industry practices for the G20 cross-border payments roadmap. Ripple also confirmed that it isn’t currently involved in any partnerships or working groups with the BIS.
“Same goes for XRPL Commons and the XRPL Foundation as I understand,” a spokesperson at Ripple told Bitcoin.com News.
Blockchain-Agnostic BIS and Unanswered Questions
A person familiar with the situation at the BIS also confirmed that Ripple was selected during a public nomination process for the 2023-2025 term and is no longer involved in any task forces or other working groups at the BIS.
Meanwhile, when searching the BIS working papers database, it returns 17 working papers related to blockchain technology, discussing tokenization, stablecoins, DeFi, and other topics. XRPL is mentioned in one document cited in this article, while Ethereum appears in six working papers and Bitcoin appears in eight.
In either case, multiple questions about the XRPL paper remain unanswered, including whether Ripple had any role in the creation of the paper, whether the company had any relationships with d-fine in the past, and why past serious outages—which appear relevant to the paper’s research subject—haven’t been mentioned in the working paper.
Bitcoin.com News will update this article should responses be forthcoming.
