India’s central bank wants BRICS members to connect their official digital currencies, aiming to make cross-border trade and tourism payments easier as geopolitics harden and more countries look for rails that rely less on the US dollar.
Reuters reported Monday the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recommended that the government place a CBDC connectivity proposal on the agenda for the 2026 BRICS summit, which India is set to host.
If New Delhi signs off, the idea would reach the BRICS table as a formal proposal for the first time.
For crypto markets, the pitch lands in a familiar spot. Payments infrastructure has become a strategic battleground, and tokenized money, whether state-issued CBDCs or privately issued stablecoins, now sits at the centre of the debate over speed, cost and control.
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.
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