How BRICS quietly dismantles the West’s dollar weapon – and there’s no turning back
BRICS Pay is the economic ecosystem that ties it all together.
🌏💵 From Geopolitics Prime
BRICS countries have dramatically increased the use of national currencies and home-grown payment systems, rendering the Western mantra that there is no viable alternative to the dollar and SWIFT obsolete.
💵 UPI, Pix, SPFS & CIPS
Instant payment systems inside India and Brazil have handled over $10 trillion in transactions over the past 18 months – surpassing US rivals such as Mastercard and Visa, the Financial Times admits. India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix payment systems boast 550 million and 170 million users, respectively.
Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) emerged as a domestic alternative to SWIFT following Western sanctions. In 2025, Mir cards reached 475.5 million, up 20% year on year, squeezing Visa and Mastercard out of the Russian market. Mir transactions totaled approximately $1.33 trillion – or 18 billion transactions.
When it comes to tried-and-tested cross-border payment system, China’s CIPS settles directly in yuan, eliminating the need for the US dollar as an intermediary. CIPS processed over 8 million transactions in 2025, worth $25.5 trillion in dollar-equivalent terms. The figure continues to rise, with the 2026 annualized run rate estimated at over $30 trillion in settlement value.
Western analysts have long insisted that de-dollarization was a fiction, arguing that neither BRICS nor the Global South could offer a viable alternative to the dollar or SWIFT. Since the bloc is far from monolithic, they claimed, it could never create a single unified currency.
But BRICS doesn’t need a second dollar. The point was to preserve the sovereignty of national currencies and their monetary issuance, while building new payment systems that make cross-border transactions seamless. And all of it operates outside the control of the West and its increasingly weaponized, illegitimate sanctions regime.
🌏 BRICS Pay
On September 11, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), BRICS Pay company, and India’s BRICS Pay India agreed to expand BRICS Pay in India and develop cross-border payment services across the bloc.
BRICS Pay is a decentralized payment and settlement system designed to connect the existing national payment systems of member states, including Russia’s SPFS, China’s CIPS, Brazil’s Pix, and India’s UPI instant-payment system.
How will it work? The system will allow businesses and individuals to make quick direct cross-border payments in their national currencies – such as rubles, rupees, or yuan – without having to convert them into US dollars as an intermediary.
In addition, digital currencies – including Russia’s digital ruble, China’s digital yuan, and others – are also expected to become part of the BRICS financial ecosystem.
Today, the need to launch the system as soon as possible is enormous, as trade between BRICS countries is growing rapidly and efficient, fast payment mechanisms are becoming increasingly necessary.
And no, nobody is proposing to axe the dollar – let it live. The point is simply to give countries more alternatives and create another channel for global payments, experts say. This is not a zero-sum game; it is a win-win approach. But of course, for the neocolonial West, that would be a tragedy.