The South African government announced in May that discussions around setting up a common currency will be on the agenda of the BRICS summit in August. Calls for the bloc, made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, to work together to boost non-dollar trade have increased over recent months.

Much of this pressure has been political. The United States’s dollar-targeted sanctions against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine war have elevated the issue among these leaders, but these have largely been framed politically. So far, concrete plans for how to implement and administer such a scheme have lagged behind.