There is no BRICS currency. There may never be one. The real project is plumbing: a spreading web of bilateral deals, shared payment rails and central-bank digital currency pilots that lets emerging-market coalitions settle trade in their own currencies, a little less dependent on the dollar each year. None of it has overturned the dollar's position. Not close. But the direction is consistent, and it is being built deliberately, one corridor at a time.
A bigger bloc, no single money
Start with the expansion. At the 15th BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August 2023, six countries were invited to join as full members. Argentina later withdrew under President Javier Milei, but Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE all joined in January 2024, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Indonesia became the tenth member in January 2025 — the first Southeast Asian nation in the group. Saudi Arabia was invited too, but as the Egmont Institute noted, the kingdom "has not formally confirmed its accession." A bigger table, then. Not a tighter union.
Paper followed. Paragraph 65 of the October 2024 Kazan Declaration welcomed "the use of local currencies in financial transactions between BRICS countries and their trading partners" and encouraged settlement "in line with BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative (BCBPI), which is voluntary and non-binding." Paragraph 66 went one step further and tasked members with studying a possible independent settlement infrastructure — "BRICS Clear" — and a BRICS reinsurance company. Studying. Not building. And on the question outsiders ask most often, the record is blunt: "no BRICS summit has produced a common currency, and none is likely to soon," per the Stratheia analysis.
Carried through the 2025 Rio summit, the agenda reached the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12–13, 2026, whose declaration acknowledged the Payment Task Force's work on interoperability and local-currency settlement while stressing "no one-size-fits-all approach," in language quoted by Interfax. The declaration criticized unilateral tariffs without naming the US — even as President Trump threatened 100% tariffs if BRICS "plays games with the dollar," per Beijing Times. So the politics are loud. The machinery, by contrast, is cautious, technical and written to let each country move at its own speed.
Money tells the same story. The bloc's own lender, the Shanghai-headquartered New Development Bank, has $100 billion in authorized capital, and local-currency lending was near 22% of its portfolio by mid-2025, per NDB figures cited by BusinessDay South Africa. Yet roughly half its bonds remain dollar-denominated. That split is the whole argument in miniature: the alternatives are real enough to use, and nowhere near large enough to replace the system they sit beside.
mBridge, after the BIS
mBridge is the most technically advanced rail in this story — a wholesale CBDC platform built for direct cross-border settlement. It began in 2021 as a collaboration between the BIS Innovation Hub, the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand and the Central Bank of the UAE, per Crowdfund Insider. In June 2024 the BIS declared "minimum viable product" stage and invited banks to "perform real transactions on it," per crypto.news. A pilot, in other words, had become a working platform.
Four months later, the BIS exited. General Manager Agustín Carstens said the BIS had "graduated out," rejecting suggestions of failure or political motives, though the FT separately reported that Washington had pressured the withdrawal. Saudi Arabia, which joined as a full participant in June 2024, then finished its own trial: "As planned, SAMA successfully completed its mBridge [proof of concept] on 13 May 2025," the Saudi Central Bank told the FT. Remaining participants include China, Hong Kong, the UAE and Thailand.
What remains is the pitch: faster, cheaper settlement with less need for the dollar as intermediary — proven in principle. Digital settlement rails raise their own hard questions, of course, from smart contract verification standards to who governs the platform once the BIS has left the room. That second question is not a detail. A rail can work in a trial and still stall over trust, rules and control.
Yuan, rupees and the bilateral turn
On SWIFT, the renminbi's rise has been real but choppy. It accounted for 4.69% of global payments in August 2024, making it the fourth most-used currency, per SWIFT's RMB Tracker. The Peterson Institute for International Economics put the peak at 4.7% in July 2024, after a late-2023 spike as sanctions "made Russia and other countries more willing to use the yuan." The share has since fallen to 2.88% — sixth — in July 2025, per SWIFT, while the dollar held 47.19% in June 2025. A rise, a retreat, and a gap that is still enormous. Alongside SWIFT, an alternative rail is growing: China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System counted more than 1,500 participants by early 2025, giving banks a route that does not run through the dollar system at all.
Bilateral trade is where the movement is hardest to wave away. China-Russia trade hit a record $245 billion in 2024, per AInvest, and the yuan was about 30% of Russia's trade settlements, up from under 2% in 2021. In December 2024, President Putin said nearly 90% of Russia-China transactions were settled in yuan and rubles, per Second Line of Defense. Finance Minister Siluanov later put it at 99.1% at the Russia-China Financial Dialogue in Beijing, per Chinese media reports. The yuan's share of FX trading on the Moscow Exchange rose from 3% in 2022 to 54% by May 2024, hitting 99.8% after US sanctions struck the exchange in summer 2024.
India's version is quieter and older. On July 11, 2022, the Reserve Bank of India created an arrangement for invoicing, paying and settling trade in rupees, per a Press Information Bureau release. It runs through Special Rupee Vostro Accounts. Authorized Indian banks open rupee accounts for partner-country correspondent banks; importers pay rupees in, exporters are paid rupees out, at market-determined rates. Simple mechanics. Deliberately so. The system asks banks and traders to change the currency of settlement without asking them to join a new bloc or adopt a new money. The accounts multiplied: 60 approvals across 18 countries in early 2023 grew to 92 accounts across 22 countries. India and the UAE signed a Local Currency Settlement System agreement in July 2023, and Commerce Minister Goyal later described local-currency settlement volumes as reaching double digits — though balances are still converted to dollars every three to six months in practice, a reminder of how far the plumbing still has to go.
ASEAN's network, the dollar's anchor
ASEAN started in November 2022, on the G20 sidelines in Bali, when the central banks of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand signed a Regional Payment Connectivity memorandum for faster, cheaper cross-border payments, per Thailand Business News. It has since extended to Vietnam (2023), Brunei (2024), Lao PDR (2024) and Cambodia (2025) — nine central banks inside one payment-connectivity initiative. Bilateral local currency settlement frameworks operate between Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and in August 2026 Bank Indonesia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore operationalized their own framework, with appointed dealers in both countries settling directly in rupiah and Singapore dollars, Xinhua reported. The plan now has a horizon: the 46th ASEAN Summit in May 2026 adopted a 2026–2030 plan, per China Daily Asia. And the volumes are no longer trivial — local-currency settlement already accounted for more than 25% of intra-ASEAN trade in 2024, against under 10% in 2019.
Reserves are where the dollar's anchor shows most clearly. The IMF's COFER survey put the dollar's share of global reserves at 58% in 2024, per the IMF's Annual Report 2025. It drifted lower — 57.74% in Q1 2025 and 56.32% in Q2 — mostly exchange-rate valuation as the dollar weakened. The euro stood at 21.13%, the renminbi unchanged at 2.12%, per Reuters and the IMF's data brief. The dollar's slide of nearly 4% in Q1 and over 7% in Q2, after April's "Liberation Day" tariffs, was mostly valuation too, not reserve managers dumping dollars.
Hedging happens at the margin instead. Reserve managers bought gold in size — central-bank accumulation pushed bullion to record highs, with a record 289 tonnes bought in three months — while investors watching the drift tend to pair it with older habits, including dividend growth strategies built for volatile markets. Gold in the vault. Dividends in the portfolio. Neither is a new world currency, and nobody serious is treating them as one. The dollar still invoices more than 70% of global trade, and even the Kremlin's language stops short of replacement — spokesman Dmitry Peskov framed the push as widening options, per Stratheia. That is the honest summary of the whole story: more corridors, more choice, the same anchor.
Disclaimer: This article is general information for educational purposes only and is not investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets are volatile and past patterns do not guarantee future results. Consult a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions.
Currency settlement deals are only half of the state-finance story; the other half is how governments manage money at home. In Pakistan that now includes a tax authority using software to cross-check returns. Abroad, the same states are recycling assets rather than raising debt — sovereign wealth funds are turning empty office towers into digital property shares.
Sources
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — BRICS Expansion and the Future of World Order — carnegieendowment.org
- Egmont Institute — BRICS and the Price of Consensus — egmontinstitute.be
- Stratheia — BRICS Expansion: A New Global Order or a Bigger Table? — stratheia.com
- Interfax — BRICS Payment Task Force on cross-border settlement — interfax.com
- Beijing Times — BRICS Backs Local-Currency Trade in New Delhi Declaration — beijingtimes.com
- crypto.news — Saudi Arabia exits China backed mBridge digital currency project — crypto.news
- Crowdfund Insider — Saudi Arabia Ends Public Role In China-Linked MBridge CBDC Platform — crowdfundinsider.com
- SWIFT — RMB Tracker, monthly editions (June–September 2025) — swift.com
- Peterson Institute for International Economics — Has the Chinese yuan's rise in global usage hit a wall? — piie.com
- Cryptobriefing — China's yuan slides to 2.38% of global SWIFT payments in April — cryptobriefing.com
- IMF — Data Brief: COFER, Q2 2025 — data.imf.org 1 2025 cofer
- IMF — Annual Report 2025 appendices — imf.org
- Reuters — Euro's Rise in Global Reserves: Dollar's Decline Explained — globalbankingandfinance.com
- AInvest — China-Russia Trade Dynamics Post-2022 — ainvest.com
- Second Line of Defense — Russia's Yuan Pivot — sldinfo.com
- Press Information Bureau, Government of India — RBI allows invoicing and payments for international trade in Indian Rupee — pib.gov.in
- Beats in Brief — India-UAE Rupee-Dirham Trade Enters 'Double Digits' — beatsinbrief.com
- Thailand Business News — Strengthening ASEAN Currency Resilience — thailand-business-news.com
- China Daily Asia — ASEAN steps up de-dollarization — chinadailyasia.com
- Xinhua — Singapore, Indonesia operationalize local currency transaction framework — chinaview.cn
- BusinessDay South Africa — Brics and the emerging payments landscape — businessday.co.za
