An interesting development worth noting—the BRICS countries have launched a digital currency experiment called “Unit.”

This isn’t an air coin; it’s backed by real assets. Specifically, each Unit’s value is anchored to a special asset pool: 40% is solid gold reserves, and the remaining 60% is evenly split among five fiat currencies—Brazilian Real, Chinese Yuan, Indian Rupee, Russian Ruble, and South African Rand. The design is pretty straightforward: it combines gold’s safe-haven attributes with a balance of the member nations’ monetary influence.

At the end of October, Russia’s Institute for Economic Strategies was the first to issue a pilot batch of 100 tokens, initially priced at 1 gram of gold per token. In essence, this is a tech test with a clear purpose: can they bypass the US dollar system for international settlement?

Mechanically, Unit is somewhat like a variant of a stablecoin, but with much stronger collateral. Traditional stablecoins are mostly pegged to the US dollar or government bonds; this one uses gold plus a basket of currencies as its underlying assets, which in theory makes it more resistant to single-currency volatility. Of course, the 60% currency portion is still subject to the economic cycles and exchange rate fluctuations of the respective countries, so it’s not a perfect solution.

Although this is still in the pilot stage and far from widespread adoption, the signal is clear—emerging economies are seriously exploring alternative tools for international settlement. How far this can actually go will depend not only on the technical implementation, but even more on the dynamics of geopolitical competition. After all, shaking up the existing financial order has never just been a technical issue.