The Reserve Bank of India has confirmed talks among BRICS states on linking payment systems through central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). At the same time, the circulating claim that BRICS is betting on XRP or the XRP Ledger has no evidence behind it.

BRICS is an alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that has added new members since 2024. The group is working on a payment infrastructure intended to operate without SWIFT and without dollar clearing. CBDCs are state-issued, centrally controlled digital money created by central banks, and they are therefore not crypto assets in the sense of Bitcoin or XRP. That distinction matters because the current debate is about state payment rails and interoperability, not about adopting a public crypto network. The payments agenda has been under discussion for more than ten years, but it still lacks a common technical foundation. India holds the chair in 2026. According to media reports, the country wants to place a “CBDC Bridge” on the New Delhi summit agenda. Governor Sanjay Malhotra confirmed the talks in August 2026, but said they remain at an early stage.

What India's central bank says about the BRICS talks

Malhotra described the matter as a discussion, not a decision. Member states are examining whether their national fast payment systems can be connected to one another. Such systems settle domestic payments almost in real time. A link to the respective central bank digital currencies is also being considered. Cross-border payments currently run through correspondent banks, which increases costs and settlement times. The declared aim of the talks is therefore to make payments between member states cheaper and faster.

“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. It remains unclear whether the outcome would be a shared platform, bilateral connections or only coordinated technical standards. It is also still unknown which member states would participate.

The project itself is not new. The group’s first cross-border payments initiative dates back to 2015. Russia brought the CBDC issue back onto the agenda at the 2024 summit in Kazan. A year later, the summit declaration in Brazil called for stronger interoperability between payment systems. Even so, no common technical foundation exists today. India wants to advance the file in 2026. The 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi is scheduled for 12 and 13 September 2026. After eleven years of preparatory work, the group still has no shared infrastructure, only a series of declarations of intent.

mBridge is the only live multi-CBDC bridge

A functioning multi-CBDC platform already exists, but it sits 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 with one another, bypassing correspondent banks. The participant list only partly overlaps with the alliance, and the platform is not formally a BRICS project.

Originally, mBridge operated under the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The BIS ended its involvement in October 2024 and described the move as a “graduation.” Since then, the participating central banks have run the platform themselves. In total, mBridge has settled USD 55.49 billion across more than 4,000 transactions. Relative to global correspondent banking, that remains a comparatively small amount. Among cross-border CBDC projects, however, it stands alone.

About 95% of the volume settled through mBridge involves the digital yuan. As a result, the platform functions in practice as an e-CNY infrastructure with additional partners attached. 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) across 3.4 billion transactions. No other central bank digital currency project reaches that scale. Even so, the XRP Ledger does not appear in the project descriptions of the central banks involved.

Why the BRICS XRP Ledger thesis is weak

Neither a BRICS state nor Ripple has confirmed any partnership involving XRP. An independent fact check also concludes that the circulating claims are unsupported. Ripple does, however, have documented pilot projects with central banks and governments. Those mandates include Bhutan since September 2021, Palau since November 2021 and Montenegro since April 2023. Colombia and Georgia are also on the list. All of those mandates date from before the current BRICS debate, and none involve a BRICS member.

The political logic of the project also cuts against the thesis. Ripple is based in San Francisco and therefore operates under US law and US supervision. The central purpose of the BRICS payments agenda is to reduce dependence on US-controlled financial infrastructure, from SWIFT to dollar clearing. Russia and Iran are full members of the alliance, and both are under Western sanctions. Observers see that as one reason for the BIS withdrawal from mBridge. The BIS rejects political interpretations and points to a planned handover. Choosing a US provider as the backbone of a system designed to bypass American control would therefore be contradictory.

The architecture question also matters. A Forbes analysis from May 2026 said multilateral CBDC interoperability has split into two incompatible camps. On one side, mBridge replaces correspondent banking with direct settlement between central banks. On the other, the BIS-led Agorá initiative seeks the opposite design: seven central banks and more than 40 private institutions 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. Neither leaves room for a third bridge built on a public crypto ledger.

BRICS members are not aligned on their own CBDCs

Even at the national level, BRICS members are pursuing very different CBDC paths. That uneven progress helps explain why a bloc-wide bridge remains more of a policy discussion than an operational project. Russia will make the digital rouble mandatory from 1 September 2026. Large banks must then allow customers to transact in the currency, and merchants with prior-year revenue above RUB 120 million must accept it. Further stages will follow later: a threshold of RUB 30 million applies in 2027, and the remaining banks and merchants will follow in 2028.

India’s digital rupee is progressing more slowly. By July 2026, the pilot had 12 million users and 175 million transactions. However, the circulating value had fallen to INR 771.7 crore by the end of March 2026, down 24% from the previous year. That means reach and actual usage are moving in different directions.

Brazil sharply downgraded its project in 2025. The central bank removed the blockchain component of the Drex CBDC because privacy and scaling issues remained unresolved. The first phase is now set to begin in 2026 without blockchain, and initially it will cover only collateral management for credit guarantees.

Taken together, these programs remain unfinished compared with the e-CNY and its USD 2.3 trillion in settled volume. Any shared bridge would require mature national systems. At present, several sides do not yet have them.