The Reserve Bank of India has confirmed talks among the BRICS states. Members are discussing how to link their payment systems with central bank digital currencies. However, the circulating claim that BRICS is betting on XRP or the XRP Ledger lacks any evidence.
BRICS is an alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that has taken on further members since 2024. The group is working on a payment infrastructure that runs without SWIFT and without dollar clearing. CBDCs are state-issued, centrally controlled digital money from central banks. They are therefore not crypto assets in the sense of Bitcoin or XRP. The payments agenda has been running for more than ten years, but so far without a common technical basis. India holds the chair in 2026. According to media reports, the country wants to put a "CBDC Bridge" on the New Delhi summit agenda. Governor Sanjay Malhotra confirmed the talks in August 2026, but classified them as an early stage.
Subscribe to our newsletter
The best articles of the week, directly delivered into your mailbox.
What India's central bank actually says about the BRICS talks
Malhotra described a discussion, not a decision. Member states are examining whether they can connect their national fast payment systems to each other. Such systems settle domestic payments almost in real time. A link to the respective central bank digital currencies is also under review. Across borders, payments run through correspondent banks instead, which raises costs and settlement times. The declared goal of the talks is consequently cheaper and faster payments between member states.
"Various options are on the table, including CBDCs and the linking of fast payment systems, but it is still at the discussion stage." - Sanjay Malhotra, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
So far there are no concrete commitments. The governor named neither an architecture nor a timetable. Thus it remains open whether the outcome will be a shared platform, bilateral connections or merely coordinated technical standards. It also remains unanswered which member states would take part at all.
The project is not new. The group's first cross-border payments initiative dates from 2015. Russia brought the CBDC topic back onto the agenda at the 2024 summit in Kazan. A year later, the summit declaration from Brazil called for stronger interoperability of payment systems. Nevertheless, no common technical foundation exists to this day. India wants to push the file forward in 2026. The 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi is scheduled for 12 and 13 September 2026. Ultimately, eleven years of preparatory work have produced no shared infrastructure, only a series of declarations of intent.
mBridge is the only multi-CBDC bridge in live operation
A functioning multi-CBDC platform already exists, though outside formal BRICS structures. Project mBridge connects the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Participating commercial banks exchange digital central bank money directly among themselves. Such transfers therefore skip the detour via correspondent banks. The list of participants overlaps only partly with the alliance, and formally the platform is not a BRICS project.
Originally, mBridge ran under the roof of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The BIS ended its involvement in October 2024 and officially called the step a "graduation". Since then the participating central banks have run the platform on their own. In total, mBridge has settled USD 55.49 billion across more than 4,000 transactions. Measured against global correspondent banking, that is a comparatively small amount. Among cross-border CBDC projects, the platform nevertheless stands alone.
Around 95% of the volume settled through mBridge falls to the digital yuan. Consequently the platform is effectively an e-CNY infrastructure with attached partners. China is also driving the project from a position of strength. By the end of 2025, the e-CNY had processed a cumulative USD 2.3 trillion (RMB 16.7 trillion). That volume came from 3.4 billion transactions. No other central bank digital currency project reaches this scale. Still, the XRP Ledger appears nowhere in the project descriptions of the central banks involved.
Why the BRICS XRP Ledger thesis is structurally weak
Neither a BRICS state nor Ripple has ever confirmed a partnership around XRP. An independent fact check likewise concludes that the circulating claims are unsubstantiated. Ripple does, by contrast, run documented pilot projects with central banks and governments. Those mandates cover Bhutan since September 2021, Palau since November 2021 and Montenegro since April 2023. Colombia and Georgia are also on the list. Moreover, all of these mandates date from before the current BRICS debate. Not a single partner is a BRICS member.
Furthermore, the political logic of the project argues against the thesis. Ripple is a company domiciled in San Francisco and therefore falls under US law and US supervision. The core motive of the BRICS payments agenda is precisely to reduce dependence on US-controlled financial infrastructure. That dependence runs from SWIFT to dollar clearing. In addition, Russia and Iran belong to the alliance as full members, and both sit under Western sanctions. Observers see that as one reason for the BIS withdrawal from mBridge. The BIS disputes political motives and points to a planned handover. Choosing a US provider as the backbone of a system meant to bypass American control would thus be a contradiction.
Then there is the architecture question. A Forbes analysis from May 2026 sees multilateral CBDC interoperability split into two irreconcilable camps. On the one hand, mBridge replaces the correspondent banking system with direct settlement between central banks. On the other hand, the BIS-led Agorá initiative pursues the opposite design. Seven central banks and more than 40 private institutions instead want to preserve the existing correspondent banking model through tokenization. The group includes JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC and SWIFT. According to the analysis, the two approaches are structurally incompatible. What stands out is that neither camp leaves room for a third bridge built on a public crypto ledger.
The BRICS states disagree on their own CBDCs
Even at national level the projects diverge widely. Russia will make the digital rouble mandatory from 1 September 2026. Large banks must then let their customers transact with the currency. At the same time, merchants with prior-year revenue above RUB 120 million must accept the payments. Further stages follow later. A threshold of RUB 30 million applies in 2027, and the remaining banks and merchants follow in 2028.
India's digital rupee is moving comparatively slowly. By July 2026 the pilot counted 12 million users and 175 million transactions. However, the circulating value fell to INR 771.7 crore by the end of March 2026. That is a drop of 24% against the prior year. As a result, reach and actual usage are drifting apart.
Brazil downgraded its project sharply in 2025. The central bank cut the blockchain component of the Drex CBDC because of unresolved questions about privacy and scaling. The first phase is set to start in 2026 without blockchain. Initially it will cover only collateral management for credit guarantees. Overall, these programmes look unfinished next to the e-CNY and its USD 2.3 trillion in settled volume. A shared bridge would require mature national systems. At present, several sides lack them.
