BEIJING/Shanghai: The BRICS bloc plans to run a live test of its unified cross-border payment settlement system before the end of 2026, with full operational launch targeted for 2027, Russian and Chinese officials involved in the project said last week in Beijing.
The timetable is the most concrete step yet toward a system that would let member states settle trade in national currencies without routing every payment through western correspondent banks. The idea was first tabled at the 2025 Kazan summit. Since then it has picked up in urgency as the group of emerging economies expanded its membership to sixty countries through partner-state arrangements.
How the pilot is designed
Under the current blueprint, the central banks of Russia and China would serve as anchor participants. The shared settlement layer would run on distributed ledger infrastructure, with each member holding a deposit account in the currencies of its main trading partners inside the bloc.Officials familiar with the draft specification said the system will support two settlement modes. One is direct bilateral clearing in national currencies. The other is a pooled multi-currency unit, referred to internally as the BRICS Unit, designed to net out trade imbalances across many pairs of members at once. The unit would be backed by a lockbox of reserves held equally in each member currency, so that no single country’s money dominates the settlement mechanics.
A senior official at Russia’s finance ministry said the first corridors covered in the test will be energy trade. This includes oil sales settled in Chinese yuan and Russian rubles, plus selected commodity routes between South Africa and Asia. India’s central bank has signalled a cautious posture, keeping rupee-based trade outside the shared layer for now. Brazil’s central bank said it would observe without committing funds. South Africa has not yet commented on whether it will participate in the pilot.
What the system has to prove
Two problems dominate the technical debate. First, currency risk. A direct settlement corridor between two members still leaves the third country holding a position in a foreign asset. That is acceptable for commodity trade, where invoices are already quoted in dollars. It becomes harder for services and manufacturing, where margins are thinner and payment lags matter.
Second, liquidity. The pooled BRICS Unit only works if there is deep supply of each member currency in the lockbox. A central bank has to be willing to keep reserves locked up 24/7 in a shared ledger. If it needs those reserves for an emergency during a market panic, it cannot easily pull them out of a pooled facility. Analysts note this echoes the problems that sank earlier attempts at a supranational clearing currency in Latin America and West Africa.
Chinese and Russian officials have stressed that the pilot will run alongside existing bilateral swap lines rather than replace them. That limits the immediate dislocation risk but also limits the immediate benefit. The swap lines already cover most of the same trade routes the shared layer would serve. Netting multiple bilateral positions into one pooled ledger is the real gain, and it requires far more participating central banks than the pilot will initially have.
Sizing the disruption
The combined intra-BRICS trade volume excluding commodity exports sits near $6.5 trillion a year, according to a Capitalight Research briefing circulated last week. Western correspondent banking clears roughly $150 trillion annually across all currencies and markets. The shared settlement layer, even with full participation, would represent a small fraction of that flow in its first operating years.
Western financial authorities have said they are monitoring the plan. A US Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on the announcement. An EU official speaking on condition of anonymity said sanctions-driven de-risking has already pushed many banks in the bloc to build parallel channels, which they see as a mesh of bilateral workarounds rather than a unified system.
Adoption outside the bloc depends heavily on compliance with western anti-money laundering standards. The pilot’s design documents do not yet say how participant due diligence would be conducted, and the FATF has not commented on whether it will audit the framework.
What to watch in 2027
Before the Congress of launch, the bloc must secure legal frameworks in each member state and reach agreement over dispute arbitration. Officials said the technical specifications for the shared messaging layer would be published in early 2027. Interested non-member central banks have been invited to observe the pilot without holding settlement accounts.
The 2027 deadline will still be difficult. Russia’s SPFS messaging network, an earlier attempt to bypass SWIFT, has struggled to expand outside the Eurasian Economic Union. India’s participation ledger shows it signed up for partner-state status but has not yet agreed to use a shared currency unit. Whether the test corridor runs by the end of 2026 depends on whether China commits yuan reserves to the lockbox before the year-end budget cycle.
For crypto markets, the timeline matters less than the liquidity design. If the BRICS Unit actually functions as a pool of real reserves rather than a synthetic token, it gives a stronger mechanism for netting trade than anything the private stablecoin market has built so far. If it fails to attract participation from India and Saudi Arabia, the project will likely narrow back to bilateral yuan and ruble settlement, which is what the swap lines already do today.Sources: TASS reports from April 2026; Sputnik News coverage of the Beijing talks; Capitalight Research briefing of Sept 30, 2026; statements from the Russian finance ministry and the People’s Bank of China.