1. The BRICS Plan: Gold Collateral, and Yuan Internationalization
2. The Real Agenda: Gold Guarantees the System
3. The Yuan-Gold Dual System: Razor and Blade
4. China’s BRICS 2025 Rollout Plan
5. The Role of Blockchain and mBridge
6. SGEI and the Quiet Test of the System
7. The Coming Announcement
8. Strategic Implications
9. Conclusion: Gold Returns, with a twist

The BRICS Plan: International Yuan With a Gold Backstop

As the world’s financial architecture fractures along geopolitical lines, this year’s BRICS Summit appears poised to deliver a significant, if underappreciated, evolution in global trade mechanics. While headlines may focus on digital currencies, de-dollarization rhetoric, or commodity pricing shifts, the real development lies in something more physical, and far more consequential: the internationalization of gold as collateral.

And central to that plan is how gold will interface with the yuan—China’s currency—as BRICS nations construct a cooperative vault infrastructure designed to spread usage, reduce distrust, and enable sovereign flexibility in trade.

The Real Agenda: Gold Guarantees the System

Although BRICS summits often produce a flurry of narratives about multipolarity and economic self-determination, this year’s core financial innovation is rooted in the creation of a multi-jurisdictional gold custody network. These vaults, currently under construction or negotiation in China, Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, represent far more than logistical upgrades. They are the structural backbone of a new settlement system where gold is the primary collateral asset, replacing the U.S. Treasury bond as the standard bearer of trust.

In the legacy SWIFT system, Treasuries have played that role. Dollar-denominated bonds provided the liquidity, yield, and presumed security needed to lubricate global trade. But now, for political and structural reasons, many nations—especially BRICS members—no longer view Treasuries as neutral or safe. The demand, therefore, is for a new currency and a new form of collateral: one that is apolitical, finite, and universally recognized.

Enter gold.

Gold holds historical and monetary weight as a bearer asset. But its integration into modern systems has always been limited by three issues: trust, settlement speed, and physical verification. This year’s BRICS summit, backed by work already done by China through the Shanghai Gold Exchange International (SGEI), is addressing all three.

The Yuan-Gold Dual System: Razor and Blade

China has made no secret of its ambition to internationalize the yuan. But it understands that the yuan cannot achieve global acceptance simply through decree or political alignment. Currencies succeed when they offer both utility and trust. China has built utility through trade deals, swap lines, and cross-border payment systems. Now it seeks to build trust.

The model is simple, but powerful: gold serves as the store of value, while the yuan functions as the medium of exchange. The two operate as complementary halves of a single monetary system. Think of it like a razor-and-blade model: the yuan is the free razor distributed through trade agreements, while gold—held securely in regional vaults—functions as the valuable blade that makes for trust and thus repeated use.

Critically, the system is built on optionality. Participants are not required to convert yuan into gold, but they may do so. In effect, this introduces a convertibility layer into the yuan that mimics the gold window of Bretton Woods without forcing a formal gold standard. It’s a model that offers flexibility for central banks, credibility for counterparties, and ballast for the currency itself.

China’s BRICS 2025 Rollout Plan

The challenge with any gold-based system is the physicality of the asset. Where is it stored? Who verifies it? How can you prevent theft, duplication, or manipulation?

The BRICS answer: geographic diversification and collective oversight.

The plan unveiled—implicitly and soon formally—by China involves the creation or certification of multiple gold vaults across the BRICS landscape. These include:

• A Saudi-based vault built with SGEI participation, allowing for direct RMB-gold conversion from oil proceeds.
• Vaults in Singapore and Malaysia, where regional trade partners can store and pledge gold for RMB-denominated credit lines.
• African and Middle Eastern vaults integrated into the system via the Belt and Road logistics infrastructure, enabling pledge-based infrastructure financing.
• Continued expansion of the Shanghai vault network, linked to international clients via SGEI, where gold is allocated separately from domestic reserves.

Rather than centralizing gold in a single jurisdiction (as the U.S. does at Fort Knox or the NY Fed), this model emphasizes mutual hostage-taking. Each BRICS member places a portion of their gold in the vaults of other members. Your gold is in my country; mine is in yours. This prevents any one actor from dominating the system and provides a natural check on bad behavior.

As one analyst put it, “They’re not reinventing anything. They’re just resurrecting the only thing that ever worked.”

The Role of Blockchain and mBridge

Speed and auditability have always been weaknesses in physical gold systems. To solve this, BRICS leaders are layering on modern architecture: blockchain and a central bank digital currency platform called mBridge.

Blockchain enables real-time auditing and verification of gold ownership across distributed vaults. mBridge enables interoperability between central banks, allowing them to settle claims backed by gold without needing to move the metal.

This solves both the trust problem and the speed problem. Gold remains stationary, but ownership can change instantly. It is “slow money” moving at “fast money” velocity. This changes everything.

Brics 2025: China Builds Global Gold-Vault Network
Golden Corridor in 3 Steps https://t.co/2Mxrp5yViz

— VBL’s Ghost (@Sorenthek) May 24, 2025

SGEI and the Quiet Test of the System

For the past year, SGEI has been buying kilogram gold bars in large quantities through non-dollar channels. These transactions are about accumulation. They are also we believe, system tests—dry runs to stress the infrastructure and build user trust ahead of a formal announcement as was done in August-October 2023 to test SGE domestic deliverability

SGE’s international arm has been engineered to avoid U.S. dollar clearing, bypassing the legacy system entirely. And by routing these purchases through international vaults, China is normalizing the practice of gold-based settlement while seeding its own network with liquidity.

This behavior has already been extended to BRICS energy deals. Russia was the pilot in 2017, accepting yuan from China in exchange for oil—but with the guarantee that those yuan could be converted into gold, earmarked in Shanghai, via blockchain verification. That template has now been extended to Saudi Arabia

Continues here