Most coverage of BRICS focuses on summits and statements, but the more interesting story is the financial plumbing the bloc is quietly building.
Payment networks, cross-border digital currencies, and local-currency lending do not make headlines on their own, yet all of them make the dollar less central to global trade.
On October 31, 2025, the Institute of Economic Strategy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IRIAS) launched a pilot of "The Unit," a digital settlement tool backed 40% by gold and 60% by a basket of BRICS member-country currencies, with the first batch coming in at 100 Units. Each Unit is pegged to one gram of gold.
The Unit is not an official BRICS currency, since BRICS leaders have repeatedly ruled out a common currency, and the collective gold reserves of BRICS members sit above 6,000 tonnes as a potential backing supply. It is a settlement layer aimed at cross-border trade between members.
BRICS Pay is a separate piece of plumbing that connects national payment networks like Russia's SPFS, China's CIPS, and India's UPI, so intra-bloc trade can move without touching SWIFT.
Per Watcher.guru reporting, BRICS Pay has reduced dollar usage in intra-bloc trade by roughly two-thirds.
China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) settled the equivalent of $245 trillion in yuan transactions in 2025, and as of January 2025 had 1,467 indirect participants across 119 countries, linking around 4,800 banks across 185 countries per the Chicago Policy Review.
mBridge is the cross-border CBDC platform that emerged from the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, and although the BIS exited mBridge in late 2024, the platform kept operating with central banks from China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
mBridge has processed about $55 billion in cross-border payments, with around 95% of that volume in digital yuan.
The New Development Bank, BRICS' answer to the IMF, issued $30 billion in loans in 2024, with about one-third of that in domestic currencies and no policy conditions on borrowers like the IMF imposes.
Reserve currency status is built on three things: network depth, liquidity, and trust.
The dollar's depth advantage is enormous, with the US Treasury market sitting at roughly $28 trillion and CIPS still nowhere near that size category. Yet the new BRICS plumbing chips at the network problem with every bank that joins CIPS, every CBDC interlink, and every NDB loan in local currency.
None of this makes the dollar disappear, but all of it makes the dollar more optional as a settlement layer.
Russia and China now settle roughly 90% of their bilateral trade in rubles and yuan per Putin's 2024 statements, a number that was negligible 10 years ago.
India officially took the BRICS presidency from Brazil in January 2026 and is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi later this year, with the agenda heavily focused on payment interoperability rather than common-currency replacement.
That is a real distinction, since interoperability lets BRICS members settle in whatever currency they want without forcing anyone to give up their own.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has been clear that India "has no policy" to replace the dollar, framing the BRICS push as practical rather than ideological. For investors, that distinction matters more than the headlines suggest.
Plumbing changes how systems work, just not on a quarterly news cycle.
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