Summary of a ChatGPT design discusson around fungibility and payment versus property law.

BRICS Pay vs. Gold Token Architecture: Design Comparison and Strategic Alignment

Summary: BRICS Pay is a high-level cross-border payment infrastructure being unveiled at the 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio. It is a blockchain-enabled settlement messaging platform designed to facilitate bilateral and multilateral trade using national currencies and it differs significantly from the gold token architecture we’ve explored.

1. Fungibility

BRICS Pay: Fully fungible. Currencies and assets (like CBDCs or proposed “BRICS UNIT”) are designed for interchangeability, functioning like stablecoins.

Gold Token System: Supports non-fungible asset binding. Tokens can be tied to specific gold bars or serialized coins, enabling title-based traceability. This is a critical distinction in legal, audit, and sovereignty contexts.

2. Scalability & Performance

BRICS Pay: Support tens of thousands of messages per second. A high-throughput decentralized messaging and transaction rail, partitioned across national nodes.

Gold Token System: Scalability is layered—using a fast, optional spend abstraction layer (fungible) on top of a slower, auditable title-based token registry (unfungible). This is optimized for reliability and legal integrity over speed.

3. Design Architecture

BRICS Pay: Built around a decentralized cross-border messaging system. Operated by central banks or state payment platforms. Not a public blockchain; private, permissioned network.

Gold Token System: Built for both public or permissioned blockchain use. Supports property law alignment, off-chain title resolution, or ZK verification. Focused on individual asset sovereignty.

Conclusion: BRICS Pay is a geopolitical tool focused on dollar displacement through interoperable, fungible currency settlement. In contrast, the gold token architecture is a resilient fallback system built on asset title, traceability, and sovereignty. While BRICS Pay is scalable and integrated at the nation-state level, the gold token system is designed to function with or without centralized support, especially in the event of systemic dollar collapse.

Each system serves different purposes—and the gold-based model remains the only viable candidate for trustable, auditable value transfer in a post-dollar scenario where finality and ownership cannot be assumed.

Prepared: June 2025