Why the New Delhi BRICS Summit Won’t Kill the Dollar — and What Actually Could

Analysis

When BRICS leaders meet in New Delhi on September 12, the headlines will again ask whether the dollar’s reign is ending. Based on what the bloc has actually committed to, it is not — not at this summit, and not through a currency. The real story is slower, quieter, and far harder to reverse: BRICS has given up on a shared currency and is building payment plumbing instead.

Will the New Delhi summit launch a BRICS currency?

No. This is the single most persistent misconception about the bloc, and BRICS itself has put it to rest. Under its 2025 presidency, Brazil explicitly shelved the common-currency concept. The reason is not timidity — it is arithmetic. A shared currency requires a shared monetary policy, and a bloc that now spans ten full members, from China to Ethiopia to the UAE, has no realistic path to agreeing on one.

India has been the bluntest about it. The country’s external affairs minister stated in March 2025 that there is “no policy on our part to replace the dollar.” When the second-largest economy in a bloc says out loud that it is not pursuing the thing the headlines assume the bloc is pursuing, that is worth believing. The New Delhi summit, held September 12–13 under India’s chairmanship, will produce announcements about cooperation and connectivity — not a currency.

For the full membership picture, the summit agenda and the bloc’s institutions, see our complete BRICS 2026 guide.

What BRICS is actually building — payment rails, not a currency

The real 2026 agenda is plumbing. BRICS is building a set of payment systems designed to let members trade with one another without routing every transaction through the US dollar and the SWIFT messaging network. This is a meaningful shift, but it is a different project from currency replacement — and conflating the two is how the headlines go wrong.

The distinction matters because the two things carry very different risks for the dollar. A rival reserve currency would challenge the dollar’s core role in pricing commodities, anchoring central-bank reserves and underpinning global liquidity. Payment rails do none of that. They make specific bilateral flows cheaper and less exposed to sanctions. They chip at the convenience of using the dollar — not at the foundation of why the world holds it.

mBridge, BRICS Pay and “the Unit” — the three systems that matter

Three concrete systems sit behind the rhetoric. The first is mBridge, a multi-central-bank digital currency platform developed with the Bank for International Settlements, which lets participating central banks settle cross-border transactions in their own currencies. By November 2025 the platform had processed more than 4,000 transactions worth $55.49 billion — modest against global flows, but a working proof of concept.

The second is BRICS Pay, a decentralised payment-messaging system linking the national networks members already operate: Russia’s SPFS, China’s CIPS, India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix. India’s central bank leads the technical coordination, and full operational deployment is targeted for the New Delhi summit. The third is “the Unit,” a digital settlement token piloted on October 31, 2025, backed 40% by gold and 60% by a basket of BRICS currencies; the New Development Bank’s president confirmed an “agreement in principle” to use it as a settlement instrument, but it has no timeline for broad deployment.

None of this is a dollar replacement. All of it is dollar avoidance at the edges. India has separately proposed linking members’ central bank digital currencies — the e-Rupee, China’s digital yuan, Brazil’s DREX and the UAE dirham CBDC — and has already signed a bilateral CBDC deal with the UAE. For how digital-currency infrastructure is developing more broadly, see our markets and crypto coverage.

Why the dollar is not going anywhere soon

Three forces stand between BRICS and any rapid change. The first is that the bloc does not actually want the same outcome — explored in the next section. The second is sanctions gravity. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western governments froze more than $300 billion in Russian reserves. The New Development Bank, the BRICS-founded lender, has had to keep its distance from Russia precisely to preserve its own access to Western capital markets. That is a vivid reminder of how much of the global financial system still runs on dollar terms.

The third force is simple inertia. The dollar’s role rests on depth, liquidity and trust accumulated over decades. Payment rails make it marginally less necessary for certain trades; they do not manufacture an alternative store of value that central banks and exporters trust at scale. Even the strongest single data point in the de-dollarisation story — discussed below — is a bilateral workaround, not a structural replacement.

The India-China fault line that caps the whole project

BRICS is routinely portrayed as a unified bloc. It is not. Its two largest members, China and India, maintain a deeply competitive relationship — shadowed by unresolved border disputes, including the 2020 Galwan Valley clash. That rivalry runs straight through the financial agenda.

China favours accelerating yuan internationalisation and the mBridge platform. India prefers its own digital rupee as the intra-BRICS standard and has consistently resisted binding BRICS agreements. India’s simultaneous membership in the Quad — alongside the United States, Japan and Australia — is a standing signal that New Delhi will hedge rather than be captured by a China-Russia axis. The Stimson Center’s post-summit analysis concluded that US tariff pressure is accelerating BRICS cohesion, but that the bloc remains too internally divided to act as a unified geopolitical force in the way NATO or the G7 does. A bloc that cannot agree internally cannot move the dollar quickly.

What actually could erode dollar dominance

Here is the forecast worth holding onto: if the dollar’s share of global trade declines, it will not be because of a summit announcement. It will be the slow accumulation of exactly the unglamorous infrastructure BRICS is now assembling — one payment corridor, one CBDC linkage, one national-currency trade agreement at a time.

The India-Russia number is the tell. Nearly 95% of that trade is now settled in national currencies — and it got there not by proclamation but because two governments found it practical under sanctions pressure. Multiply that pattern across dozens of corridors over a decade and the dollar’s share erodes at the margin. The metric that matters is therefore not whether BRICS announces a currency, which it will not, but how much intra-bloc trade quietly moves off the dollar each year. Watch the rails, not the rhetoric. US tariff policy, paradoxically, speeds this up: by threatening 100% tariffs on countries that move away from the dollar and then imposing levies that reached 50% on Brazil and India, Washington has handed BRICS the clearest possible incentive to build the alternatives faster.

What it means for Brazilian businesses and investors

For a Brazilian exporter or an investor watching the real, the practical takeaway is to ignore the currency-war headlines and track the payment infrastructure instead. If BRICS Pay genuinely connects Pix to its Chinese, Indian and Russian counterparts, the concrete effect is cheaper, faster settlement on trade with those economies — a margin question, not a geopolitical one.

The dollar will still price the contracts and anchor the reserves. What changes, slowly, is the cost and the sanctions exposure of moving money between BRICS economies — and that is genuinely useful for Brazilian agribusiness, energy and manufacturing exporters with growing Asian order books. The story to follow into the New Delhi summit is not a currency. It is whether the rails go live, who connects to them, and how much trade flows across them in the year that follows. That is the de-dollarisation that counts — and it is the part the headlines will mostly miss. For ongoing market coverage, see our markets and finance section.

Reported by Richard Mann for The Rio Times — Rio de Janeiro, 20 May 2026. Analysis based on The Rio Times BRICS 2026 guide. Sources: BRICS Brazil presidency; Reuters; Bank for International Settlements; Reserve Bank of India; Banco Central do Brasil; New Development Bank; TASS; Stimson Center; Peterson Institute for International Economics.