Vladimir Putin has been photographed holding a mock-up BRICS banknote at more than one summit now, and each time the image ricochets around social media as proof the dollar’s days are numbered. It isn’t. As of 2026 there is no BRICS currency, no launch date, and according to Brazil, India, and Russia themselves, no formal proposal ever put on the table for one. What the bloc actually has is something less cinematic and considerably more consequential: a slow, deliberate build-out of payment infrastructure designed to route around the dollar rather than replace it outright. Understanding the difference between those two things is the whole story.
The Currency That Was Never Actually Proposed
The idea of a shared BRICS currency traces back to the 2022 BRICS summit, where Putin first floated the concept of an international reserve currency to rival the dollar, a proposal that gained urgency after Western sanctions cut Russian banks off from SWIFT following the invasion of Ukraine. Two years later, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor, announced that a BRICS+ Business Council working group was studying concrete plans, and the most developed of those plans, known as the Unit, envisioned a benchmark token backed 40 percent by gold and 60 percent by a basket of BRICS national currencies. JP Morgan analysts called it the most thoroughly developed de-dollarization proposal to come out of the bloc, which says less about the Unit’s viability and more about how thin the competition has been.
The Unit never made it past the concept stage. It didn’t even make the final communiqué at the Kazan summit in 2024, and interest from other member states was, by most accounts, lukewarm at best. Brazil, which held the BRICS presidency in 2025, explicitly shelved the idea, with the Brazilian president stating there had been no proposal, no draft, and no internal discussion to create a BRICS currency. India’s foreign minister has been equally blunt, stating outright that there is no policy to replace the dollar. Russia said in January 2026 that talks on a common currency have not taken place and are not taking place now. When three of the five founding members go out of their way to deny something publicly and repeatedly, it’s usually because the idea has already died quietly and everyone is now managing the fallout of the rumor.
Why a Shared Currency Was Always the Wrong Question
It’s worth explaining why a genuine BRICS currency was always a long shot, because the obstacles are structural rather than political. A shared currency requires the kind of monetary and fiscal convergence the eurozone spent decades building, and even then Europe’s monetary union nearly came apart during the 2010–2012 debt crisis among countries that share language groups, trade relationships, and, broadly, a continent. BRICS members share none of that. China runs a managed, capital-controlled currency regime. India runs a large current account deficit and needs a currency that can absorb shocks independently. Russia’s ruble is a sanctioned, geopolitically toxic asset that few outside the bloc want to hold in reserve. Getting these five, let alone the ten full members and ten partner countries the bloc has since grown to, to cede monetary sovereignty to a shared unit was never remotely realistic, and the smarter voices inside the bloc appear to have understood that from the start.
Trump’s tariff threats accelerated the retreat rather than caused it. In early 2025 he warned that any country backing an alternative to the dollar would face a 100 percent tariff, repeating the threat through the year and declaring at points that “BRICS is dead.” The practical effect was to give wavering members political cover to distance themselves from the currency talk publicly. Indonesia’s foreign ministry stated flatly it was “not interested in the issue of de-dollarization” after the threat landed, and South Africa followed a similar line. Whether the tariff threat actually changed anyone’s underlying calculus or simply gave cover to abandon a proposal that was already going nowhere is a fair question, and the honest answer is probably some of both.
The Infrastructure That’s Actually Being Built
What survived the retreat from a common currency is a payments strategy, and this part of the story is real, measurable, and moving faster than most Western coverage acknowledges. BRICS Pay, a decentralized payment messaging system letting members transact in local currencies, is targeting full deployment around the September 2026 New Delhi summit, with India’s central bank leading technical coordination. Separately, Project mBridge, a multi-central-bank digital currency platform originally incubated by the Bank for International Settlements, has processed more than 4,000 transactions worth roughly $55.5 billion as of late 2025, allowing participating central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to settle cross-border payments directly in their own currencies rather than routing through correspondent banks and the dollar.
The mBridge story carries its own caveat, and it’s an important one. The BIS formally withdrew from the project in October 2024, handing it over to the participating central banks after Western officials grew uneasy about a Chinese-influenced settlement rail that could plausibly help sanctioned entities move money outside dollar-clearing oversight. The project kept running without the BIS, and the 2024 BRICS summit under Russia’s presidency floated extending it into a broader “BRICS Bridge,” but the concept was received coolly enough that it also failed to make that year’s final communiqué. Under India’s 2026 chairship, linking member states’ CBDCs is back on the agenda as an operational priority rather than a talking point, which tells you where the bloc’s actual energy is going: not toward symbolism, but toward plumbing.
What the Reserve Data Actually Shows
The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves stood at 56.92 percent in the third quarter of 2025 according to the IMF’s COFER data, down from over 70 percent in 2000 but essentially flat quarter over quarter, with much of the recent movement attributable to exchange rate effects rather than active central bank selling. The euro sits a distant second at just over 20 percent, and the renminbi, despite a decade of predictions that it would emerge as a serious rival, has actually declined to under 2 percent of allocated reserves. That last figure is the one that undercuts the loudest de-dollarization narratives most directly. If BRICS were engineering a genuine shift away from the dollar toward a rival anchor, China’s own currency would be the most obvious beneficiary, and it simply isn’t showing up in the numbers. What is showing up is gold, whose share of reserves has climbed from around 13 percent in 2017 to roughly 30 percent by late 2025, which points to central banks diversifying into a neutral, apolitical asset rather than consolidating around any single currency, BRICS-issued or otherwise.
Bilateral trade settlement tells a genuinely different story from reserve composition, and it’s the part of the de-dollarization case that holds up best under scrutiny. Russia and China now settle roughly 90 percent of their bilateral trade in rubles and yuan, a shift driven almost entirely by sanctions cutting Russia off from dollar-clearing channels rather than any coordinated BRICS policy. That’s a meaningful, real-world reduction in dollar transaction volume between two specific economies under specific duress, but it is a narrower and more circumstantial phenomenon than the framing of a bloc-wide “de-dollarization agenda” suggests, and generalizing from the Russia-China case to the rest of BRICS overstates what’s actually happening among members that face no comparable sanctions pressure.
Substance and Symbolism Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
The honest read on BRICS currency ambitions in 2026 is that the symbolism was always louder than the substance, but the substance that does exist, in payment rails, CBDC interoperability, and bilateral settlement among sanctioned or sanctions-adjacent economies, is worth taking seriously precisely because it doesn’t require the political impossibility of a shared currency to matter. The Lowy Institute’s assessment that a fully functioning, trusted alternative to SWIFT or the dollar remains decades away, if achievable at all, is probably the most defensible position available. BRICS isn’t building a rival to the dollar. It’s building an insurance policy against being cut off from the current system the way Russia was, and that’s a narrower, more achievable, and in some ways more durable project than the currency headlines ever gave it credit for.
The question worth asking isn’t whether BRICS will unveil a currency at the New Delhi summit this September. It won’t. The question is whether enough of the bloc’s members quietly conclude, one sanctioned transaction or frozen reserve at a time, that owning their own payment infrastructure is worth the cost of building it, regardless of what currency ends up denominating the trade.
