Russia’s Brics Currency That Never Happened

The much talked about BRICS common currency project was discreetly shelved ahead of the BRICS heads of state summit in October 2024. Nor did it figure on the agenda at the 2025 July summit in Brazil. English- and Russian-language sources had, ahead of the 2024 summit, leaked details of a Russian-designed interbank common settlement currency. The authorities never acknowledged its existence. The project looked impracticable from the start and was antagonistic towards the West. It underlined Russia’s desire to change the world financial order. 

Russian-led BRICS settlement currency rejected

In 2024, the year of its BRICS presidency, Russia failed to enlist the support of the bloc’s members for an embryonic Global South alternative to the Western-dominated global financial system. Its centrepiece was meant to be a sanctions-busting BRICS common settlement currency. 

Shortly before the BRICS heads of state summit in Russia, President Putin confirmed his earlier statements that a BRICS common settlement currency was not under consideration. 

The Western press reported on the negative reaction at the 2024 summit to Russian proposals for alternative BRICS payment and currency-related tools. The other BRICS members were concerned these would expose them to US sanctions against third countries that “worked with Russia’s war machine”.  

The Russians further retreated on the common currency project after the US president-elect, Donald Trump, warned in November 2024 of 100% tariffs on BRICS nations creating or backing a rival to the dollar, repeating the warning after his inauguration in January 2025. Through its spokesperson, the Kremlin responded with an ambiguous denial, claiming “the creation of new financial platforms in the BRICS has not been and is not underway”. He added that experts needed to “explain in more detail” to Trump “the BRICS agenda”. At the start of 2025, India, Brazil, South Africa and new BRICS+ member UAE expressed serious reservations about Russia’s dedollarization campaign and dissociated themselves from the common settlement currency idea.

The Russian president had originally said the impetus for the BRICS currency project in 2022 was to end the dollar’s “hegemony”. As further justification, he accused the Western authorities of “irresponsible” macroeconomic policies, “including the launch of the printing press, uncontrolled emission and accumulation of unsecured debts.” 

Leaked details of a digital common settlement currency 

Unofficial documents deliberately leaked in October 2024 gave us a picture of what was believed to be the BRICS currency envisaged by the Russians. 

A White Paper and a 16-page FAQ Sheet posted on the hastily created minimalist website of an organisation called the Unit Foundation revealed that a blueprint for a digital currency, to be called the Unit, already existed in considerable detail. The FAQ Sheet identified the little-known Russian-based Cold War entity, the International Research Institute for Advanced Systems (IRIAS),  as the Unit’s developer. Both these unauthenticated documents (there was also a publicly inaccessible Unit governance rule book) were in professionally written English, the FAQ sheet being of lesser quality.

The documents were initially greeted with scepticism because neither the stated authors nor the website were properly attributed. One Western metals industry commentator even wondered if the project was a “hoax”. Another claimed the authors, one Russian and the other Chinese, were an investor and a fund manager. 

Digital common settlement currency and related instruments  

The Unit was not intended as legal tender but was to be used in cross-border central bank, government, banking institution and trade transactions. It was to take the form of a digital token emitted (minted) by any qualified participant at any “node” of a future fractal network called the Unit ecosystem. Emitters would deposit currencies and gold bullion at the node in their jurisdiction to buy tokens at the prevailing valuation for all Unit tokens across the network of nodes. 

According to the White paper, once a liquid aftermarket for trading Units or for selling them for currency emerged, the “reserve basket” valuation price would be superseded by a market price.  Existing world cryptocurrency exchanges could be ready-made platforms for trading the future Units. 

The Unit would not be confined to the now expanded BRICS+. It was described in the White paper as a “global currency alternative within the existing financial infrastructure” not subject to geopolitical pressure. Its ecosystem would function using the same blockchain technology as for cryptocurrencies, making payments with Units undetectable by the West’s SWIFT banking information exchange system.

Russia openly led the project, with the only other BRICS members referenced in open source being Brazil, represented by the Brazilian head of the Shanghai-based BRICS New Development Bank, and China, playing a key role in the experimental mBridge central bank digital currency (CBDC) trading platform. 

Before the 2024 summit, the Russian director of the BRICS Business Council’s Task Force on Financial Services announced via a Russian news agency that the common settlement currency was one of several BRICS financial infrastructure projects underway during Russia’s presidency. These included a platform for international settlements in digital currencies (Bridge), a payment system (Pay), a settlement depository (Clear), an insurance system (Insurance), and a debt rating alliance. He also specified that the Unit’s valuation basket of currencies would consist exclusively of BRICS national currencies.

In parallel, the BRICS Chairmanship released a 48-page high-level report, “Improvement of the International Monetary and Financial System” in English, sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Finance and Central Bank plus a private Russian consulting company. It set out the Global South rationale for an overhaul of the global financial system that would downgrade the dominant role of the US dollar and other Western currencies. The report did not specifically mention any BRICS currency but contained technically detailed proposals for the currently IMF administered “Global Financial Safety Net” and the introduction of a BRICS Cross-Border Payment Initiative (BCBPI). 

A 40% commodities valuation basket consisting of gold 

The Unit Foundation documents contained a major surprise: the 40% commodities component of the “reserve basket” for minting Units would consist entirely of gold bullion alongside the 60% BRICS currencies basket. This was a radical departure from the 20 or so varied exchange-traded commodities including gold recommended in recent years by Putin loyalist Sergey Glazyev, the neo-Marxist former economic advisor to Putin and afterwards Russia’s Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics at the Eurasian Economic Union. The Unit was instantly recognizable as the 60% currencies, 40% commodities valuation model he had advocated for several years. Some even claimed Glazyev, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and fierce critic of current Russian monetary policy, was the Unit’s real architect. 

The 40% all-gold component was a significant change to the initial diversified commodities basket which he stated had been successfully simulation tested. It was probably the first time that a gold standard, albeit partial, was contemplated for an international common currency. 

Gold’s major role was not a complete surprise. Already in 2022, Glazyev had advocated the renationalization of the Moscow commodities exchange to enable domestic Russian quotations for gold. This, he wrote at that time, would lay the basis for a Russian “gold standard” linking the national currency to a subsequent international payment and settlement instrument having reserve currency status.

In an interview at the start of 2025, his rhetoric changed. He claimed that a diverse commodities valuation basket was the long-term aim, asserting that the all-gold basket was an easy to understand “interim version” and,  historically, gold is always a safe-haven in a “world war”. 

Already Deputy Secretary of an intergovernmental committee called the Union State of Russia and Belarus, Glazyev was in April 2025 named its Secretary in a stated routine rotation of duties. 

A challenge to the West

The Unit’s all-gold 40% commodities basket can be interpreted as a rejection of the Western system of fiat currencies. Russia’s economic conservatism, a legacy of Soviet times, means it has difficulty accepting that modern money originates from unsecured credit creation and monetary emission. Russian popular understanding of money still lingers from that era. It considers money should be sufficient to keep spending and pre-planned economic output within prescribed limits, helped by artificially maintained prices and exchange rates. 

Russian support for the gold standard — a hybrid war tactic

However, the challenge to the West of the revival of a partial gold standard needs to be viewed in the triple context of Russia’s hybrid war against the West, its genocidal conventional war against Ukraine, and the unsustainable path of its heavily sanctioned and recklessly managed war economy. Failing in the last two areas, it was rational for Russia to attempt a manoeuvre in the first where it is more successful (recruitment of Western politicians, disinformation, sabotage, hacker attacks, etc.). The gold standard card was played to exploit what the Russians perceive as the Western economies’ vulnerability after the fiat money-induced soaring indebtedness and deficits of recent years. Ignored by the Russians is the fact that these were the consequence of economic stabilisation measures to deal with severe global crises (Covid, inflation, energy sourcing) triggered in some instances by Russia itself. 

Putin’s approval of the former gold-backed US dollar

At an outreach/BRICS+ meeting at the 2024 summit, Putin unexpectedly praised the gold standard, acknowledging its contribution to US dollar stability up to the Jamaica Accords in 1976 which ratified the end of the Bretton Woods agreements. He lamented that the world financial system thereafter became dependent on the dominance of the US economy and dollar for its stability. His words sounded like an endorsement of future gold-backed currencies. In this light, the Unit could have been a first step. 

The Unit’s design made it even more of a “gold” currency. According to the earlier mentioned documents, the BRICS currencies in the non-gold valuation basket had to be acceptable in payment for gold and their value “anchored” to gold (the gold price in each currency). The basket currencies could then be valued not in currency terms but in terms of gold itself. 

Advocates of a gold standard ignore that to tie any currency to gold risks a repetition of the misfortune of the 1930s Great Depression. The US dollar’s peg to the gold standard at the time prevented the monetary emission that would have restored normal employment levels in the collapsing US economy. Instead, the economic slump spread across the globe, exacerbated by high US import tariffs and by other currencies also on the gold standard. 

Metals and gold traders’ concern over a gold-standard Unit or ruble 

The potency of gold weaponised by Russia against the West was highlighted in speculative talk in Western metals and gold trading circles about the feasibility of a gold-standard BRICS currency or even Russian ruble. A hypothetical gold-standard ruble was quickly ruled out by those circles as destabilising for the global monetary system and stoking dangerous geopolitical tensions. The upheaval from these scenarios would come from the currency market turbulence caused by rerating any future gold-backed currencies against fiat currencies, the modern form of money across the globe today including in Russia. 

Putin on a “changing” global economy 

The Russians seem fully aware of the potential disruption to the global monetary system from the allegedly “natural” changes in the global economy and “end of the USA’s leadership” which Russian propaganda predicts. After his words of approval of the post-WWII gold-standard dollar at the same outreach/BRICS+ meeting, Putin recognised the potential turmoil from these presumed future developments, saying the “transformations” should be “civilised”. 

Drawbacks of the Unit’s design 

The Unit would not fulfil all the functions of a single currency: legal tender, a payment means, store of value, reserve currency. It would initially be only a payment instrument priced in line with the Unit basket’s underlying value, becoming a store of value once an after-market emerged. 

The leaked documents denied that the Unit digital token would be a cryptocurrency, citing its gold and currency backing. They also disputed it would be a stablecoin because currency and gold could not be redeemed and because eventual market pricing would not be linked to the collateral. In 2024, metals trading sites had called the anticipated BRICS currency a “gold-backed  stablecoin”. 

Entities minting a Unit would relinquish their currency and gold forever. The collateral would be held in perpetuity by the ecosystem node where the token was minted unless there would be a buyout of all the node’s tokens simultaneously. 

The gold valuation component would require entities minting Unit tokens to sacrifice a precious metal that in 2019 was upgraded from its previous status as a zero risk-weighted Tier 3 asset in the Basel III capital adequacy framework. This enabled gold’s new use by banks as zero-risk collateral and for credit risk mitigation. However, since July 1, 2025, 100% of the market value of physical gold in bank balance sheets officially qualifies under the Basel III Endgame reform as a Tier 1 High-Quality Liquid Asset. Gold removed from their balance sheets to mint Units would now deprive banks of the significant boost to their capital adequacy and liquidity ratios from this new upgrade. 

Gold’s scarcity, the security risks associated with bullion deposited at widely dispersed ecosystem nodes, plus the absence of government, central bank or international financial institution guarantees, would be further deterrents to market adoption of the Unit.

As with other blockchain-type currencies, the necessary legal basis and operational infrastructure do not exist today for tokens to generate any interest income for investors. 

Two Soviet-era features 

The Unit ecosystem was to be managed by IRIAS itself. An International Intergovernmental Organization (or “IIO”) founded in 1976 and compliant with a certain 1980 Budapest Convention drafted by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), IRIAS today is a specialised engineering institute with an EU branch in Budapest. The Unit was designed by IRIAS’s Center for International Financial Development, as named in the FAQ Sheet.

According to the previously mentioned Russian director of the BRICS Financial Services Task Force, the Unit’s design drew on the experience of the Soviet transferable ruble (TR). He called the Unit TR’s “counterpart” from the standpoint of settlement procedures. As the financial unit of account for internal Soviet bloc trade, the TR was set at fixed but periodically revised exchange rates  against the US dollar and USSR satellite state currencies. It was deliberately overvalued for propaganda purposes.

Justified concerns about the Unit’s integrity would arise at any sign of Soviet-style operating practices.

BRICS platform for settlements

At the 2024 summit, the Russian president said he was prioritising solutions for the serious currency payment difficulties between the BRICS members. These problems exist because Russia has imposed dedollarization on its BRICS partners. Since the war on Ukraine, Russian export revenues have been systematically stranded in BRICS buyer nations because of exchange controls, the usual convertibility and liquidity issues, and fear of secondary US sanctions on the bloc’s banks. 

According to rumours emanating from Western metals and gold trading circles, a candidate payment and trading platform for future BRICS CBDCs, and as initially thought for Units, is the digital mBridge platform. Developed to minimum viable product stage at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) by China and other Asian partner countries, the platform is now independent of the BIS after rumoured fears that Russia would exploit mBridge to avoid sanctions and undermine the dollar. The platform appeared suitable for merging with, or replacing, the BRICS proposed proprietary Bridge platform.

Conclusion

The suspended Unit project shows that Russia has spread its hybrid war against the West to the financial sector, pressurizing its partners in BRICS+ and the Global South to take part. These nations nevertheless balked at Russia’s overoptimistic common settlement currency plan to crowd out the dollar. Yet they have for some time been mobilized by Russia and China for related financial schemes such as digital money (CBDCs), central bank gold reserves, alternative payment platforms (mBridge) and dedollarization. The West has lost the initiative in these segments. 

Russia’s rapid embrace of fintech and its instrumentalization against the West is striking. In August 2024, the Kremlin legalized cryptocurrency use in international payments, formalizing crypto as a sanctions evasion tool. The Unit’s stablecoin-type design is yet another example of this kind of instrumentalization. 

At the same time, Russia has surprisingly joined US critics of the Trump administration’s Genius Act of July 2025 which allows US corporations to issue stablecoins. An advisor of the Russian president has expressed concern that stablecoins, tied to US Treasuries, will be manipulated to reduce US government debt and to rival Federal Reserve dollars, destabilising the international financial system. With its propaganda predicting US economic collapse, the Kremlin is naturally irritated by a proposed US debt-crisis solution. Its apparent alarm at the “uncivilised” rule change to the dollar system is more understandable. The repercussions are likely to be felt across the globe, leaving no country unscathed. Tactical changes in Russia’s financial sector hybrid war against the West can now be anticipated in this higher risk international monetary environment. Russia will certainly accelerate work on payment systems and platforms for BRICS currencies. 

Against this backdrop, Ukraine has for the past 43 months courageously defended not only the West’s democratic freedoms. It has prevented the arrival on the European continent of damaging economic practices witnessed recently in the US and for more than a century in Russia.