A Currency Is Only as Strong as Its Trust. BRICS Is Building Its Own
and some structural changes are already happening
For decades, the dollar has not only dominated global trade and finance, but it has also served as an instrument of policy—used to reward allies, punish adversaries, and shape the contours of international order. As of mid-2025, over 58% of global foreign exchange reserves remain in dollars, and nearly 88% of global FX transactions involve the dollar on at least one side. The majority of commodities, including oil and industrial metals, continue to be priced and settled in USD. This dominance has less to do with any formal mandate and more to do with deep capital markets, network effects, and trust in US governance. But that trust is no longer universal.
The growing interest among BRICS+ countries in building an alternative system is not ideological or even purely economic. It’s structural. It’s strategic. And for many, it’s overdue.
The question is not whether the BRICS nations are about to launch a single currency that will displace the dollar. They aren’t. What they are doing is trying to reduce exposure to a financial system they increasingly view as politicized and unstable. In 2024, over 35% of Russia's total trade was settled in Chinese yuan. India and Russia have settled an estimated $45 billion in energy and arms deals in rupees and rubles since sanctions began. Bilateral trade between Brazil and China settled in local currencies now accounts for nearly 50% of total transactions, a sharp rise from under 5% just three years ago. While these shifts may seem fragmented, they reflect a broader strategic trend: the construction of parallel financial systems that emphasize autonomy and resilience over global consensus.
Amid this shift, the idea of anchoring future trade settlement to gold is resurfacing—not as a nostalgic return to Bretton Woods, but as a response to trust that has quietly frayed. Gold remains one of the few assets that carry no counterparty risk. It cannot be sanctioned, seized, or devalued by policy. In the first half of 2025, several BRICS+ central banks—including China, India, and Kazakhstan—were among the notable gold buyers, reinforcing the bloc’s broader trend toward reserve diversification. While individual contributions varied, with China leading the group and others like Russia showing net sales, the overall posture of BRICS+ remains one of strategic accumulation amid a shifting global monetary landscape. For a group of countries that have seen reserves frozen, payment systems blocked, and debt weaponized, that matters more than theoretical efficiency. The intention is not to replace fiat currencies for domestic use, but to create a unit of account or clearing tool for international trade, insulated from political risk.
This thinking is not new. What’s different now is the convergence of capability, motive, and momentum. Russia’s SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) now connects over 160 foreign banks across more than 20 countries, while China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) processed approximately 175 trillion yuan in cross-border payments in 2024—a 43% year-on-year increase. These systems are not yet replacing SWIFT, but they are increasingly being used for sanctioned trade, energy contracts, and bilateral settlements. The institutional infrastructure, from development banks to payment networks, is already being built. There is no need to speculate about a “future” multipolar financial world; it’s being assembled piece by piece in plain view.
History offers relevant comparisons, and also important cautions. The euro was created with a unified currency and shared monetary policy but without full political integration, and the consequences of that imbalance are still visible. BRICS+ is not attempting to repeat that model. Their goal is not monetary union, but rather coordination—settling trade and storing reserves in instruments that are transparent, collectively governed, and less vulnerable to single-country risk.
This approach may not appeal to those who are invested in the efficiency of the existing system. But for many countries, especially those in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the question of financial sovereignty is not theoretical. It is directly tied to food imports, energy access, inflation exposure, and political independence. When reserves can be frozen based on foreign policy alignment, and when the value of their local currencies is tethered to the fiscal discipline of a country running trillion-dollar deficits, alternative options are not just attractive—they become necessary.
Europe is not blind to this either. Germany and Italy have quietly begun reevaluating the storage of over a third of their foreign gold reserves held in U.S. vaults—a reflection of growing anxiety about U.S. financial stewardship under a potential second Trump administration, where rising political unpredictability, tariffs, and shifting alliances are increasingly seen as posing risks to long-term strategic stability.
The dollar remains dominant by every metric that matters—deep markets, global trust, liquidity, and habit. But those advantages rest on an assumption of neutrality that is no longer taken for granted. The momentum behind BRICS+, and the broader rebalancing of global financial power, may not produce a new global hegemon. But it may well produce credible alternatives, and that alone could shift the logic of how international trade is conducted.
If the foundation of any currency system is trust, then we are watching a slow, deliberate effort to rebuild it—elsewhere, and on different terms.