New Delhi, September 13, 2026. A coalition of roughly 50 digital asset executives, institutional allocators, and regulators from 21 countries signed the Digital Asset Round Table (DART) Charter on Sunday at the iBRICS Summit, a private-sector conference running alongside the 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit. The charter sets out shared principles for the issuance, custody, settlement, and investor protection of tokenized assets across BRICS member and partner states. It also proposes linking India's UPI payment network with Brazil's Pix system and advancing interoperability among member nations' central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Whether any of it becomes operational infrastructure is a separate question.

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What the Charter Actually Does

The DART Charter is a framework document, not a live network. It targets tokenized infrastructure, energy, and real estate assets intended for sovereign portfolios rather than retail cryptocurrency markets. The principles it establishes cover custody standards, settlement procedures, and investor protections. The wider iBRICS Summit that produced it drew over 500 institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds, and Gulf family offices, collectively representing approximately $1 trillion in assets under management.

The summit's structure reflected its ambitions. Day 1 featured a closed-door "Sovereign Capital Compact" focused on non-dollar settlement corridors, while Day 2 moved to pre-matched bilateral deal tables, situating the DART Charter within a broader deal-making agenda rather than treating it as a standalone declaration.

Lakshmi Narayanan, chairman of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, framed the gathering as a structural shift. "Until now the allocators of sovereign capital and the builders of those rails have sat in different rooms," he said at the summit. "For twenty years, cross-border investments within BRICS were discussed politically and executed bilaterally through outside intermediaries."

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The Gap Between the Summit Hall and the Leaders' Room

The critical context here is what the formal BRICS New Delhi Declaration did not say. India, serving as 2026 BRICS chair under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," spent much of its chairmanship pushing a framework to link member nations' domestic CBDCs, including the e-rupee, China's digital yuan, Russia's digital ruble, and Brazil's Drex, through shared technical standards for bilateral settlement without routing through SWIFT. That proposal did not make it into the leaders' communiqué. The word "CBDC" does not appear in the declaration. Paragraph 90 only "acknowledged" exploratory work by a BRICS payments task force and noted there is no universal approach to the problem.

The omission reflects unresolved disagreements among member states. Analysts point to China's reported caution about exposing its CIPS financial messaging infrastructure to multilateral oversight, the reluctance of Gulf members to move away from dollar pegging, and Russia's demand for sanctions-proof channels that other members will not formally endorse as the fault lines that prevented consensus.

Those disagreements sit against a revealing backdrop. The US dollar still accounts for approximately 51 percent of SWIFT payment messages and approximately 88 percent of global foreign-exchange turnover, illustrating the scale of what any de-dollarization effort must displace. At the same time, more than 67 percent of intra-BRICS trade already settles in local currencies as of early 2026, a figure that suggests the infrastructure challenge is less purely theoretical than it might appear.

Ajay Srivastava of the Global Trade Research Initiative offered a direct assessment of the declaration's outcome: "Without a coordinated action plan, trade in local currencies may grow gradually but is unlikely to reach significant volumes." Sudhakar Dalela, Economic Relations Secretary at India's Ministry of External Affairs, offered the official government counterpoint, describing local-currency settlement as "a practical mechanism to reduce transaction cost in bilateral trade."

The declaration did address crypto in one notable way. Paragraph 42 groups "illegal virtual asset flows" with terror financing and money laundering. For virtual asset service providers (VASPs) operating across BRICS jurisdictions, this signals tightening anti-money-laundering and counter-financing-of-terrorism compliance requirements. That is arguably the most immediately operational regulatory signal to come out of New Delhi for the digital asset industry.

The declaration also addresses a longer-horizon technology risk. Paragraph 95 flags quantum computing as a potential threat to financial infrastructure and signals a multi-year BRICS roadmap for post-quantum cryptography standards, a commitment with direct implications for institutions and developers building on BRICS payment rails.

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The Technical Infrastructure Behind the Ambitions

The DART Charter's settlement ambitions rest on existing and partially live infrastructure. BRICS Pay, an interoperable multi-currency settlement layer connecting UPI, China's CIPS network, and Russia's SPFS messaging system, began operational deployment in 2026. Its Decentralised Cross-border Messaging System (DCMS) is rated at up to 20,000 messages per second. An earlier technical predecessor, Project mBridge, processed more than $55.49 billion in transactions across 4,000-plus settlements through late 2025. The Bank for International Settlements handed mBridge over to its participating central banks in October 2024 after the project reached minimum viable product stage; those institutions include the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the UAE Central Bank, and the Saudi Central Bank. One significant complication: reportedly more than 95 percent of mBridge settlement volume runs through China's digital yuan, a concentration that makes other BRICS members wary of deep integration.

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Regional Implications: South Asia and Africa

For South Asia, the practical stakes center on remittances. The annual remittance corridor from Gulf BRICS partner states into South Asia exceeds $125 billion. Indian workers in UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, all BRICS partner nations, currently pay 4 to 7 percent in transaction fees through correspondent banking chains. CBDC-linked or fast-payment rails could compress those costs substantially. That is arguably the strongest real-world argument for accelerating India's e-rupee adoption, which has stalled badly. Retail e-rupee users number around 7 million against UPI's 550 million registered users, and circulation actually fell 24 percent year-on-year to roughly 771.7 crore rupees (approximately $92 million) as of March 31, 2026.

A meaningful regional caveat concerns the countries just outside BRICS membership. If payment rails are optimized for member and partner states, South Asian neighbors including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka face a potential "outer ring" problem: further disadvantaged in correspondent banking precisely because they fall outside the framework's scope.

For Africa, the charter's focus on tokenizing infrastructure and energy assets carries direct relevance. According to analysis of BRICS summit documents, critical minerals from countries including the DRC, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are positioned as candidates for tokenized offtake contracts that could settle without dollar intermediation. African BRICS partner nations, including Ethiopia and Egypt, are part of this emerging framework, though Egypt's dollar-pegged economy and existing IMF support arrangement create capital control and convertibility barriers that the DART Charter does not address operationally. South Africa's central bank is already running a wholesale CBDC pilot called Project Khokha, which could serve as an entry point for broader interoperability pilots on the continent.

Intra-African remittance costs average 8 to 10 percent, among the world's highest, and reducing those costs is a stated target of the BRICS payment framework. Whether the charter's principles translate into infrastructure accessible to non-member African economies remains an open question.

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What Comes Next

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra confirmed the existence of a BRICS payments task force and described current CBDC-linking discussions as exploratory. A technical standards workgroup, referenced in the DART Charter document, will determine whether its custody and settlement principles produce anything developers and institutions can actually build on. Some analysts are skeptical. A Forbes analysis from May 2026 argued that multilateral CBDC interoperability is effectively dead following an institutional split between Project mBridge, which the BIS handed to participating central banks in 2024, and Project Agorá, the BIS's current successor initiative in this space. The New Delhi Declaration's silence on the subject does little to challenge that view.

The broader picture is more nuanced than a simple impasse. BRICS Pay is operationally deployed, and more than 67 percent of intra-BRICS trade already settles in local currencies. The DART Charter's technical standards workgroup and the Sovereign Capital Compact's bilateral deal tables represent concrete next steps, even where the leaders' declaration stayed cautious. Whether the gap between the summit hall and the leaders' room narrows will depend less on new frameworks than on resolving the specific disagreements that kept the CBDC proposal out of the communiqué: China's caution about CIPS exposure, Gulf members' dollar pegging, and Russia's insistence on sanctions-proof channels.