The 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit convenes in New Delhi on September 12-13 with central bank digital currencies at the top of the economic agenda. India, chairing the bloc in 2026, has proposed linking the e-rupee, China's e-CNY, Russia's digital ruble, and Brazil's Drex for bilateral trade settleme...
"The idea is not to create a single BRICS currency. Instead, we are advocating stronger links between the digital currencies issued by individual central banks." — Reserve Bank of India, CBDC interoperability proposal, January 2026
The 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit convenes in New Delhi on September 12-13 with central bank digital currencies at the top of the economic agenda. India, chairing the bloc in 2026, has proposed linking the e-rupee, China's e-CNY, Russia's digital ruble, and Brazil's Drex for bilateral trade settlement — bypassing the U.S. dollar as intermediary. The proposal arrives as three of those four CBDCs are either live or entering mass rollout: Russia mandated digital ruble acceptance by systemically important banks on September 1; China's e-CNY has processed 3.4 billion transactions worth $2.3 trillion cumulatively; India's e-rupee has reached 10 million users across welfare payment pilots.
The timing is not coincidental. BRICS now encompasses 11 nations representing 40% of global GDP (PPP) and 24% of global merchandise exports. The bloc's share of world exports is on track to overtake the G7's 28.9% share by the end of 2026, according to EY India analysis. Meanwhile, the dollar's share of SWIFT payments sits at 50.99% as of July 2026. The question facing New Delhi is whether CBDC interoperability can meaningfully dent that figure — or whether the effort fragments into competing, incompatible rails.
The 18th BRICS Summit convenes under India's presidency theme: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability." The bloc now comprises 11 members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — following the January 2024 expansion.
Cross-border digital payments dominate the economic agenda. According to Business Today, India is pushing for three parallel tracks: (1) CBDC interoperability across member states, (2) linkage of fast payment systems such as UPI, and (3) expanded use of national currencies for trade settlement. A final agreement on a unified payment settlement system is not expected at this summit, according to Business Standard reporting. The focus instead is bilateral linkages — incremental plumbing rather than a single architecture.
The summit takes place against a backdrop of accelerating CBDC development globally. According to the Atlantic Council's CBDC Tracker, 137 countries are now engaged in CBDC-related activity, covering 98% of global GDP. Ten countries have fully launched CBDCs, 48 have active pilots, and 24 — including the EU, Japan, UK, and India — are rolling out retail CBDCs in 2026.
China operates the world's largest CBDC deployment. By December 2025, the People's Bank of China reported 230 million personal wallets and 18.84 million institutional wallets, with cumulative transactions reaching 3.4 billion worth approximately 16.7 trillion renminbi ($2.3 trillion). Monthly transaction volume consistently exceeds $28 billion.
Two structural shifts occurred in January 2026. The PBOC reclassified e-CNY as deposit liabilities rather than digital cash, and began paying interest on e-CNY balances at demand-deposit rates. In early April, the operator network expanded to include seven national joint-stock commercial banks and five city commercial banks. These moves signal a transition from pilot to permanent monetary infrastructure.
The Central Bank of Russia mandated digital ruble acceptance from September 1, 2026. The country's 12 systemically important banks are now required to process digital ruble transactions. Retailers with annual revenue exceeding ₽120 million ($1.3 million) must accept digital ruble payments. The Bank of Russia confirmed on August 21 that major banks had validated their readiness.
The rollout is phased: banks with universal licenses and retailers with revenue above ₽30 million must comply by September 1, 2027. All remaining banks and retailers (above ₽5 million) follow by September 2028. Payments use a universal QR code system operated by the National Payment Card System (NPCS). Despite the infrastructure being ready, the Moscow Times reported in July 2026 that public demand remains weak.
India's digital rupee has expanded to approximately 10 million users, up from 7 million earlier in 2026. The RBI's annual report for FY2025-26 recorded CBDC-Retail circulation at Rs 771.66 crore. Cumulative transactions since the December 2022 launch total $3.6 billion — a fraction of China's volume but growing through targeted welfare integration.
The RBI has routed portions of India's roughly $80 billion welfare system through the e-rupee across approximately 10 pilot programs. Pilots in Puducherry and Chandigarh used the e-rupee for Public Distribution System food subsidies, with funds programmed for specific purposes — usable only at designated ration shops. Future plans include enabling PhonePe and Google Pay to offer digital rupee wallets, which would dramatically expand the addressable user base.
Brazil's CBDC is the laggard. The Banco Central do Brasil abandoned most tokenization and blockchain elements in 2025, citing scaling and privacy challenges. The revised Drex plan targets a phased launch: a first phase without decentralized elements by mid-2026, followed by a second phase that reintegrates blockchain technology. In March 2026, BCB official Alessandro Fraga stated that Drex's primary purpose is to add programmability to money. The pivot to a centralized architecture accelerates delivery but reduces the CBDC's interoperability with blockchain-based counterparts.
The infrastructure for CBDC cross-border settlement has fractured into two competing platforms with no overlapping membership.
mBridge, initiated by the BIS Innovation Hub, has settled over 4,000 cross-border transactions with cumulative value of $55.5 billion — a 2,500-fold increase since early 2022 pilots. Participants include the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the UAE, and the Central Bank of Saudi Arabia. China's e-CNY accounts for an estimated 95% of total settlement volume.
The BIS transferred governance of mBridge to participating central banks in October 2024, effectively stepping away from the project. Forbes reported in May 2026 that the era of multilateral CBDC interoperability is over — the platforms represent competing answers from competing blocs.
Project Agorá, the BIS's replacement initiative, launched with seven G7-aligned central banks and more than 40 private institutions including JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, and SWIFT. The two platforms cannot converge technically or politically.
This bifurcation poses a direct challenge to India's BRICS CBDC proposal. India is not a member of either platform. The Reserve Bank of India's proposal for linking member CBDCs must either integrate with mBridge's existing infrastructure — dominated by China — or build a parallel architecture. Neither option is straightforward.
While CBDC interoperability remains theoretical for most BRICS members, India's Unified Payments Interface has already established operational cross-border links. UPI is accepted in 10 countries: the UAE, Singapore, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Bhutan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and — as of June 2026 — Greece, through a tie-up between Eurobank and NPCI International Payments.
Cross-border UPI transaction counts grew 20-fold in FY2025, from 37,060 in FY2024 to 755,445 in FY2025. More than 1.5 million international merchants have been onboarded. Singapore's link runs directly into PayNow, enabling peer-to-peer transfers using phone numbers. In July 2026, India and Spain agreed to advance technical talks on linking UPI with Spain's Bizum.
As Forbes noted, UPI has an advantage over both Agorá and mBridge: it exists, it settles, and host countries have signed on without committing to a CBDC architecture. NPCI's stated goal under the Viksit Bharat 2047 framework is to expand UPI to 20 nations by 2028-29.
The irony for the BRICS summit is that India's most viable cross-border payment tool is not a CBDC at all — it is a conventional real-time retail payment system extended internationally through bilateral agreements.
The BRICS CBDC proposal is frequently framed as a de-dollarization instrument. The data warrants skepticism.
The U.S. dollar held 50.99% of global SWIFT payment value in July 2026, according to SWIFT's Global Currency Tracker. The euro held 21.78%, and the renminbi 3.10%. Together, USD and EUR comprise over 70% of global payments by value.
mBridge's $55.5 billion in cumulative volume — while a 2,500-fold increase from early pilots — represents approximately 0.03% of annual SWIFT message traffic. The cross-border payments market was valued at $195.3 billion in 2026, according to Grand View Research.
BRICS merchandise exports have risen from $1 trillion in 2003 to approximately $6 trillion in 2024, and the bloc's export share (24%) is converging with the G7's (28.9%). But export volume does not automatically translate to dollar displacement. The majority of commodity trade — oil, metals, agricultural products — is still priced and settled in dollars, even between BRICS members.
Russia, under sanctions, has successfully rerouted bilateral trade with China and India into local currencies. But this is sanctions-driven reorientation, not voluntary currency substitution. Without external pressure, the incentive for BRICS members to abandon dollar settlement is limited: the dollar's liquidity, depth, and universal acceptance impose real switching costs.
The BRICS CBDC linkage proposal faces at least four structural constraints:
Heterogeneous architectures. China's e-CNY is deposit-based. India's e-rupee is token-based. Brazil's Drex is abandoning blockchain entirely. Russia's digital ruble runs on a centralized platform. Interoperability between these systems requires either a common intermediary layer or bilateral translation protocols — neither of which exists.
China's dominance. China accounts for roughly 70% of BRICS combined GDP and 95% of mBridge settlement volume. Any CBDC interoperability framework risks becoming a yuan settlement system with satellite currencies — a dynamic smaller members may resist.
Governance vacuum. With the BIS having exited mBridge and no supranational body overseeing BRICS payment architecture, governance defaults to bilateral negotiation. The 2024 Kazan Declaration proposed a "BRICS Clear" system, but no operational timeline or institutional structure has materialized.
Privacy and surveillance concerns. CBDCs, by design, offer central banks visibility into transaction flows. Linking CBDCs across borders raises questions about data sharing, capital flow monitoring, and the potential for one state to gain visibility into another's domestic payment activity. The Human Rights Foundation's CBDC Tracker has flagged these surveillance risks as a primary concern across all CBDC deployments.
The BRICS summit on September 12-13 will formally discuss CBDC interoperability, but a unified payment system is not expected. The near-term outcome is bilateral linkage agreements between individual member CBDCs.
Three of four core BRICS CBDCs are operational: China's e-CNY (3.4B transactions, $2.3T cumulative), Russia's digital ruble (mandated September 1), and India's e-rupee (10M users). Brazil's Drex has dropped blockchain and targets mid-2026.
CBDC cross-border infrastructure has split into two blocs: mBridge (China-led, $55.5B settled) and Agorá (G7-aligned, BIS-backed). India is in neither.
India's UPI — a non-CBDC retail payment system — is already operational across 10 countries with 1.5 million merchants and 20x transaction growth in FY2025. It is the most functional BRICS cross-border payment tool.
The dollar's SWIFT share at 50.99% remains structurally entrenched. mBridge's cumulative volume equals roughly 0.03% of annual SWIFT traffic. De-dollarization via CBDC interoperability remains aspirational, not operational.
The New Delhi summit will produce declarations of intent on CBDC interoperability. The operational reality is more constrained. BRICS members are building CBDCs at different speeds, on incompatible architectures, and with divergent domestic objectives. China is years ahead. Russia is mandating adoption under sanctions pressure. India is routing welfare payments. Brazil has deprioritized blockchain.
The more productive near-term path — already underway — is the extension of existing fast payment systems like UPI through bilateral agreements. These systems move money today, require no architectural convergence, and avoid the governance and surveillance complications inherent in cross-border CBDC linkage.
The BRICS CBDC proposal matters less as an imminent technical achievement and more as a political signal: that a bloc representing 40% of global GDP is actively building alternatives to dollar-denominated settlement infrastructure. Whether those alternatives achieve meaningful scale depends less on summit declarations and more on whether member states can resolve the architecture, governance, and trust deficits that currently separate aspiration from settlement.