Every few summits, the world is promised a dollar-killer. Every few summits, it arrives as a press release and leaves as a footnote. The pattern is so reliable you could set a kettle by it: a communique hints at monetary revolution, a handful of headlines gasp, and then the actual document turns out to be a polite paragraph about “exploring instruments.” The dollar, meanwhile, does not so much as flinch.
The cast keeps growing. BRICS — once a tidy acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — has bolted on new members and floated, with varying enthusiasm, the idea of a shared currency and home-grown payment rails to sidestep Western plumbing. It is a serious bloc representing a serious slice of humanity and output. And yet its marquee 2025 gathering, the Rio summit, produced what one legal analysis bluntly described as no concrete progress toward a shared currency, and no coordinated de-dollarisation roadmap to speak of. The ambition is loud; the deliverables are quiet.
Picture the corner of the café where the regulars gather — the ones who, somewhere between the second and third cup, announce they are going to open a rival shop. A better shop. A shop that will finally break the chain franchise across the street that overcharges everyone and changes the rules whenever it likes. The manifesto is glorious. The branding is sketched on a napkin. But when the bill lands, they do what they always do: split it among themselves, each paying in whatever coins they happen to have. No new shop. Just a slightly more interesting way of settling the tab.
That, stripped of the drama, is what BRICS is actually doing. Not founding a rival currency so much as quietly agreeing to pay each other in their own change. And the change is real. Russia and China now route the overwhelming bulk of bilateral trade through the ruble and yuan; India has bought crude in rupees; Brazil and China cut the dollar out of their exchange as an intermediary. There are prototype payment systems — BRICS Pay among them — inching toward demonstration. This is plumbing, not rupture: useful, unglamorous, and a long way from a monetary big bang.
The reason the big bang keeps failing to detonate is that the members do not actually agree on what they are building. India has openly resisted a common currency, wary of swapping dependence on Washington for dependence on Beijing — its own foreign minister has called the dollar a source of stability. Brazil still parks the lion’s share of its reserves in dollars. And when Washington threatened punishing tariffs on anyone caught de-dollarising, several members suddenly developed a keen interest in not being quoted. A bloc that cannot agree on the menu is not about to print its own money.
There is also the awkward matter of the incumbent’s grip. The dollar’s dominance is not affection; it is infrastructure — deep Treasury markets, contract enforcement, and the simple fact that almost everyone already uses it. A currency is a network, and networks are stubborn. The Lowy Institute’s reality check on the lofty agenda calls replacing the greenback a herculean task, and the numbers agree. The dollar still sits at just over 56% of global reserves — a record low, yes, but a record low that is still more than every rival combined. Much of even that slip was currency swings, not central banks bolting for the exit.
So what is genuinely happening is smaller and more durable than the headlines: not a coup, but a hedge. More local-currency settlement, more payment interoperability, more sectors quietly invoicing around the dollar. The expert consensus, including a level-headed explainer on whether a BRICS currency can reshape trade, points to a slowly multipolar payments landscape rather than a single throne being overturned. That is a meaningful trend. It is also nothing like the revolution the napkin promised.
The honest verdict, then, is that the dollar is not being overthrown so much as nibbled at — a steady erosion at the edges by people who would love a replacement but cannot agree on one and cannot yet build one. The currency nobody ordered is still mostly on the menu as a rumour, written in the margins, ordered by no one, served to no one. The regulars in the corner will keep talking about their rival shop. The bill, for now, still comes in dollars — and they will keep paying it, one local coin at a time.
