Ripple is no longer part of the Bank for International Settlements' cross-border payments task force, the company confirmed to Bitcoin.com News. Ripple had been a member since 2023. The confirmation lands just weeks after the BIS published a research paper on the XRP Ledger — a piece of timing that crypto observers noticed immediately, even if no one involved has bothered to connect the dots publicly.
A paper, then a quiet exit
The BIS paper examined the XRP Ledger, which is the chain Ripple built its business around. Research arms publish papers on all sorts of networks, and a paper isn't a policy statement. But it did generate a wave of questions across the crypto industry — mostly of the "what does the BIS actually think about XRPL" variety. Then Ripple's seat on the task force turned out to be empty.
Ripple's membership dated back to 2023, when the company joined the BIS group working on cross-border payment rails. That's a subject Ripple has spent years arguing it can improve, so the seat made sense at the time. Now it doesn't hold one.
Nobody's explaining the timing
Here's what's on the record: Ripple confirmed it's out. The BIS published the XRPL paper weeks before. That's it. None of the parties involved — Ripple, the BIS, or anyone else — has explained how the research relates to Ripple's removal from the task force. It's possible there's no connection at all. It's also possible there is one, and the silence around it is doing a lot of work.
The BIS hasn't said anything about Ripple's exit either, at least not publicly. That leaves the two events sitting next to each other on the timeline with no official bridge between them.
Why the task force seat mattered
The BIS cross-border payments task force is exactly the kind of room a payments-focused crypto company wants to be in. Cross-border settlement is slow and expensive, and Ripple has pitched XRPL-based rails as a fix for years. Being in the working group gave the company a seat at the table where those standards get discussed.
Losing that seat doesn't kill Ripple's payments business. The company has other partnerships and its own network to lean on. But it does remove a line from the resume, and it comes at a moment when the BIS is clearly paying attention to the ledger Ripple is built on.
What's still unanswered
The obvious question — did the XRPL paper prompt the exit, or was the timing coincidence — has no public answer. Ripple hasn't elaborated beyond confirming its departure. The BIS hasn't commented on the membership change.
Until someone says otherwise, the sequence stands as two facts in search of an explanation. The next thing to watch is whether the BIS publishes anything further on XRPL, and whether Ripple's absence from the task force gets addressed by either side in the weeks ahead.
