The picture you see above is the prototype of a payment card that runs on top of the BRICS international payment system. The website noted on the card is not a dummy site – it is real, though I do not know just how much of it is actually functional at this time.

This international payments system has been in the works for well over a year – and probably longer than that. There are still plenty of details to be worked out. The specific medium of exchange to be used, has not been determined – as far as I can tell, this system is still one that simply permits settlements in national currencies, WITHOUT resorting to the SWIFT system.

That latter system connects up over 11,000 banks through a messaging platform, that basically (in EXTREMELY oversimplified terms) tells Bank One to transfer a certain amount of a specified currency from Account A to Account B at Bank Two.

SWIFT is a private system, headquartered in Belgium, involving the various Western banks, and owned by those member banks – but it is subject to the regulatory regimes of the Federal Reserve and the ECB. Given that the largest and most powerful banks that use it are all under American and European supervision, if those regulators tell the banks under their purview to stop sending money to or receiving money from the accounts of banks that are on the G7’s shit-list… well, those shit-list banks are therefore out of the SWIFT system.

This is exactly what happened to Russian banks, starting from 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula – which, to be clear, was ALWAYS historically Russian territory, and was NEVER handed over to Ukraine by any kind of treaty or democratic agreement.

From that point onward, the Russians started developing out their own national payments infrastructure, designed to shield their banking system from Western SANKSHUNS!!!!!.

They succeeded, as I can personally attest, having visited Russia three times since the start of their Special Military Operation in 2022. Their payments infrastructure is every bit as good as what you will find all but the most advanced Western countries – and, in many cases, is BETTER.

The problem is, rolling out that payments infrastructure to the rest of the BRICS+ nations, is actually very difficult.

Every BRICS+ nation will be at different levels of financial development. China, for instance, has its own national payments system – but its retail banking sector is actually quite weak, because most of its population does its banking through gigantic conglomerates or state-owned banks. Russia, by contrast, actually has a very strong and robust retail banking sector – there are dozens of banks in Russia that cater to individual and business accounts, and Sberbank, which was once the state-owned bank, is widely recognised today as one of the world’s most innovative banks.

India has a very large “unbanked” population – numbering in the hundreds of millions. There is a very good reason for this: if you have a bank account in India, you have to pay taxes on income streams deposited into that account. And, given the Indian Federal tax rate is like 30%, and given what a shithole India is, with appallingly bad public services, it is therefore not a surprise at all that low-trust Pajeets have no interest in paying taxes. So they transact mostly through cash, and mobile app payments – where, to give Indians their due, their MPesa and UPI systems are in fact highly innovative.

We could go on for quite some time. Each individual BRICS+ nation is at a different stage of development along the path of having a proper banking system. Therefore, trying to create a unified messaging and money transfer platform, is COLOSSALLY difficult. The back-end infrastructure of global payment systems IS NOT easy to build – take my word for it on this – and nor is it a trivial matter to get different national payment systems to work together. I have barely even begun to describe the problems involved, and I am by no means a deep-knowledge subject matter expert on the issue.

But… we are now seeing the beginnings of a new financial order coming together. And that BRICS payment card prototype, is the first demonstration of the front-end technology. Whether the back-end is fully operational, is very much open to question – but it does seem to be getting there.

The importance of this development cannot be overstated. If the architects of the Western financial system are paying any attention whatsoever to the upcoming BRICS summit in Kazan’, which starts very soon – in fact, the BRICS Business Forum wrapped up just today – then they should be sweating bullets.

The advent of a true globally scalable, secure, stable, and reliable BRICS+ payment system will allow for rapid digital settlements between BRICS+ central banks. That was one of the original ideas behind this system – to use some sort of digital currency backbone to settle in national currencies between different countries. I had heard many different idea proposed, ranging from a stablecoin of some kind, to a gold-backed and metals-backed currency, to a new currency built on a basket of currencies, like the old “bancor” idea that John Maynard Keynes proposed as the fundamental unit of exchange within the old Bretton Woods system, or the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that the IMF has the ability to issue.

If, or rather, in my opinion, WHEN, this becomes a reality – in whatever form it takes – the dominance of the dollar is DONE.

This is not hyperbole. Think about it. Why would anyone want to use SWIFT, and pay the (quite exorbitant, in relative terms) fees to send money through a literal cartel of correspondent banks to transfer money overseas, when they could go through a digital system with far lower fees, and transact directly in local currencies, with local exchange rates? And if people can do this peer-to-peer, or business-to-business… what need is there for the dollar?

There are people in the West who recognise the dangers. The problem is, their solutions are entirely wrong.

One of them is none other than His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, who has threatened to impose 100% tariffs on anyone who abandons the use of the dollar when settling international trades.

This is an incredibly dumb idea from Ornj Boi. The Trumpasaur should really understand the root causes behind the rest of the world’s desire to flee the dollar. And that root cause is very simple:

The FUSA sanctions anyone it doesn’t like. It freezes their bank accounts, locks them out of the global financial system, and makes life impossible for them. It does not matter whether these people are individuals, businesses, or entire countries – anyone who says or does anything the FUSA does not like, gets SANKSHUNNED.

One can reasonably argue that this is justified in the case of “rogue actors”, like, say Iran. (I happen to disagree, not least because Iran is not nearly as big a threat as Americans think it is.) However, it is NOT justified in the case of people like you and me, who happen to think that chocolatiering is disgusting and evil, and that paedophiles should be impaled without grease.

It is also not justified in the case of hundreds, if not thousands, of people who showed up on Jan 6, 2021, to protest the blatant theft of a Presidential election. Yet, those people were de-banked – JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America YEETED them right out of their own accounts, froze their funds, and turned over their records to the police, before those people were ever actually convicted of any wrongdoing.

That is the reality of living and working in the FUSA, or the collective West in general, nowadays. (There is a reason why I write under a pseudonym and do not disclose specific details about my location, after all.)

Now imagine you could open up a payments account with the BRICS nations, all through a mobile app. Imagine you could bank anywhere in the BRICS+ nations – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia, China, Egypt, Iran, or any one of another dozen countries. Sure, many of them might not be particularly salubrious locations, but you can have at least some assurance that your money will not be confiscated just because you have the “wrong” opinions.

Indeed, if you happen to have a bank account in Russia (as I do), then you can be quite sure that the Russian government will not simply freeze your funds, just because you dislike homosexuals, or think paedophiles are evil. They generally leave you the hell alone. All they ask in return, is that you mind your own business, and stay out of the legitimate functions of the Russian government.

That is what banking and finance should have been all about. It could have been that way in the West, until everything became feikh & ghey. The BRICS payment system looks like it could go a long way toward rectifying all of that.

Make no mistake, there is still a great deal to work out and nail down. In particular, The Unit – the proposed single blockchain-based medium of exchange that has been causing some waves among crypto-bugs and advocates of blockchain-based money – has to be developed further. The idea behind it is HUGELY exciting. The proposal is for a currency that is 40% backed by the gold reserves of the member nations, and 60% backed by a basket of national currencies, presumably weighted by their GDP PPP contributions within the bloc.

If that becomes real, then I suspect it will be similar in concept and execution to something like a gold-backed stablecoin. And we already know that stablecoin-based transactions, on the new Ethereum 2.0 network, are fast, stable, and secure – now that Ethereum has moved to Proof-of-Stake, the speed of the network has increased dramatically, and we now have it on good authority that stablecoin transaction volumes have exceeded those of PayPal. (They still have a long way to go before overtaking VISA, the West’s largest payments network – though NOT the world’s largest.)

And once all of that comes together… the days of dollar dominance are effectively OVER.

When that happens – well, the US economy collapses, because all of those dollars are going to go somewhere, and they will have nowhere to go but back to the FUSA. At that point, inflation will no longer be at around 10-15%, as it is today – it will exceed 100% within a matter of WEEKS.

All I can say is that great forces are on the move in the world. It is an exciting time to be involved in the fundamental movements of money and trade.