India’s Central Bank Proposes BRICS CBDC Alliance - A Direct Challenge to Dollar Dominance
Forget SWIFT upgrades and diplomatic handshakes. The real move against dollar hegemony just got a digital blueprint.
BRICS Goes Blockchain
India's central bank is floating a radical idea: link the digital currencies of BRICS nations. Think of it as a financial VPN—a dedicated, high-speed corridor for trade that bypasses the traditional dollar-clearing choke points. No more waiting for New York to wake up or worrying about sudden sanction switches. Value moves peer-to-peer, central bank to central bank, on a shared ledger.
It's a technical end-run around a political problem. By building interoperable CBDC platforms, these economies could settle transactions in their own digital currencies, drastically cutting out the greenback middleman. The efficiency gains alone are a powerful incentive—faster settlements, lower costs, and reduced currency risk for everyone inside the network.
Of course, the old guard won't just watch its rails rust. Legacy systems have a way of clinging to relevance, often through sheer inertia and the comforting, expensive complexity of the status quo. This proposal is a direct shot across the bow of that system. It's not about creating a new reserve currency overnight; it's about building the infrastructure that makes one possible—and making the current one optional.
The race isn't to mint the most digital cash; it's to write the rulebook for how it connects. Whoever defines that interoperability standard wins. India's suggestion shows the BRICS bloc is moving from theoretical de-dollarization talk to the practical, code-level work of making it happen. The dollar's exorbitant privilege just met its most credible threat yet: a better network.
Wall Street's response? Probably to price in the 'geopolitical risk premium' and charge you extra for it.
CBDC Link-Up Builds On Earlier BRICS Payment Pledges
The plan could still draw heat from Washington. US President Donald TRUMP has earlier called the bloc “anti-American” and has threatened tariffs on BRICS members, according to the Reuters report.
The RBI’s MOVE builds on language from the 2025 BRICS Rio de Janeiro declaration, which backed greater interoperability between members’ payment systems to make cross-border transactions more efficient.
India’s central bank has also publicly signalled interest in linking the digital rupee with other CBDCs, presenting it as a way to speed up cross-border payments and expand the rupee’s usage, according to the report. It has stressed that its push to expand the rupee’s global use is not intended to drive de-dollarisation.
RBI Warns Stablecoin Growth Could Undermine Monetary Trust
BRICS still has groundwork to cover before any bridge goes live. None of the Core members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has fully launched a CBDC, and each is still running pilots. India’s e-rupee pilot has reached about 7M retail users since Dec. 2022.
Execution also hinges on hard choices that crypto builders will recognize, shared technical standards, governance rules and a mechanism to settle trade imbalances that can build up when one side exports more than it imports.
One option under discussion reportedly involves bilateral foreign exchange swap arrangements between central banks.
That imbalance problem is not theoretical. Reuters noted that earlier attempts by Russia and India to expand local-currency trade ran into complications after Russia accumulated large rupee balances with limited ways to use them, leading the RBI to allow investment of those balances in local bonds.
Even so, India continues to frame its CBDC push as a regulated alternative to the private stablecoin boom, and the RBI has warned that widespread stablecoin use can threaten financial stability and trust in money.
