The de-dollarisation story has always been told in gold.
Central banks buying gold. Countries settling trade in local currencies. BRICS nations accumulating physical metal to build a monetary system outside the dollar's reach. Every headline, every analyst note, every investor presentation has focused on gold as the primary beneficiary of the world's gradual move away from dollar dependence.
Something shifted in 2025 that most investors missed.
Russia formally declared its intention to add silver to its strategic state reserves — outlining in its Draft Federal Budget for 2025-2027 an allocation of approximately $535 million for precious metals acquisition, explicitly listing silver alongside gold, platinum, and palladium. This was described as "monumental" by precious metals analysts — the first time a major central bank had publicly declared silver purchases for state reserves during the current precious metals bull market.
At the 2024 BRICS Summit, Russia also announced a plan for BRICS countries to establish a platform for directly trading precious metals, including gold, silver, and diamonds, without the use of US dollar intermediation.
De-dollarisation is no longer purely a gold story — as we explored in our analysis of de-dollarisation and gold. And the implications for silver investors — including the growing number of Indian investors tracking MCX silver and holding silver ETFs on NSE — are significant.
Why Silver Was Left Out of the Reserve Story (Until Now)
For most of the 20th century, central banks treated silver almost exclusively as an industrial metal rather than a monetary reserve asset. The reasons were practical:
Storage economics: Silver has a much lower value-to-weight ratio than gold. One tonne of silver is worth roughly 1/80th of one tonne of gold. Storing meaningful monetary reserves in silver requires vastly more physical space and infrastructure.
Historical demonetisation: The global silver standard effectively ended by the early 20th century. Most countries had moved to gold-only or fiat standards by the time the Bretton Woods system was established post-World War II.
Liquidity and market depth: Gold's market is far deeper and more liquid. For a central bank needing to transact in hundreds of tonnes, gold's LBMA market is more practical than silver's more fragmented infrastructure.
These constraints remain real. But the calculus has shifted in ways that make silver's partial re-entry into the reserve conversation logical rather than surprising.
What Changed: The Sanction Wake-Up Call
The 2022 freezing of approximately $300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves after the Ukraine invasion did not just accelerate central bank gold buying. It triggered a fundamental reassessment of what forms of reserve wealth are truly sovereign and truly unreachable by foreign powers.
Gold had the obvious answer: physical gold held in domestic vaults cannot be sanctioned, frozen, or seized by a foreign government's decree. This is why central banks bought over 1,000 tonnes annually for three consecutive years from 2022 to 2024.
Russia's logic in adding silver follows the same reasoning. Silver held in domestic vaults is just as immune to foreign interference as gold. It cannot be frozen in a Western clearing system. It cannot be seized by executive order from Washington. For a country operating under comprehensive Western financial sanctions, physical precious metals represent one of the few remaining forms of internationally recognised value storage that remains fully under domestic control.
The Russian Finance Ministry earmarked 51 billion rubles for precious metals and gemstones purchases in 2025, with similar levels planned for 2026 and 2027. This is not a symbolic gesture — it is a multi-year commitment embedded in federal budget legislation.
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View Live CFTC Data →The BRICS Precious Metals Platform: What It Means
At the October 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia announced that BRICS nations would develop a platform for directly trading precious metals — gold, silver, and diamonds — among member states, denominated in local currencies rather than US dollars.
This is directly connected to the BRICS "Unit" currency pilot launched on October 31, 2025: a digital trade settlement instrument whose reserve basket is composed of 40% physical gold and 60% BRICS currencies. While the Unit pilot currently references gold rather than silver explicitly, the broader precious metals trading platform announced at the Summit includes silver as a stated asset class.
Why does a BRICS precious metals exchange matter for silver?
Currently, the international benchmark prices for both gold and silver are set in London (LBMA) and New York (COMEX) — both within the Western financial infrastructure that BRICS nations are seeking to reduce dependence on. A parallel precious metals exchange, settling in local currencies among BRICS+ nations (which include Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE), would create an alternative price discovery mechanism outside Western control.
BRICS nations collectively control significant silver mining output and industrial demand. China is the world's largest silver consumer for industrial purposes. India is one of the world's largest silver jewellery markets. Russia is a significant silver producer. A BRICS precious metals trading platform among these nations is not a marginal development — it is potentially a structural reshaping of how silver prices are discovered globally.
Who Is Actually Buying Silver as a Strategic Asset?
Beyond Russia's formal declaration, sovereign interest in silver has been surfacing from multiple directions:
Russia: The most explicit. $535 million allocated across 2025-2027 for precious metals including silver, embedded in federal budget legislation. Multi-year commitment at the highest government level.
India: As a major global consumer of both industrial and jewellery silver, India's relationship with the metal has always been significant. India is now showing strategic interest in silver as a reserve diversifier — balancing its massive industrial demand with a growing view of the metal as part of a broader precious metals reserve strategy, according to sovereign wealth analysts tracking the space.
Saudi Arabia: Reports have emerged of Saudi sovereign wealth entering the silver market, often through silver-backed instruments, as the kingdom diversifies its massive capital reserves away from dollar-dominated assets. Saudi Arabia becoming a BRICS+ partner adds another dimension to this interest.
Institutional convergence: Global silver ETF inflows reached 95 million ounces by mid-2025, surpassing total 2024 inflows. Institutional allocations to silver are rising alongside gold — a trend expected to accelerate in 2026 as sovereign interest raises silver's profile from purely industrial commodity toward strategic monetary asset.
Silver's Monetary History: A Foundation Worth Understanding
Silver's re-emergence as a strategic asset is not without historical precedent. For most of recorded human history, silver was as central to monetary systems as gold — often more so in everyday commerce.
The word "rupee" itself derives from the Sanskrit "rūpya," meaning silver. India's monetary system was on a silver standard for centuries. The Spanish silver peso — mined in the Americas — was the closest thing the 17th and 18th centuries had to a global reserve currency. Chinese trade was settled in silver for hundreds of years.
Silver's demonetisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a political choice driven by Western nations moving to gold monometallism — not a verdict on silver's intrinsic monetary properties. The metal's unique combination of scarcity, durability, divisibility, and universal recognition remained intact.
In an era where governments are questioning the foundations of the dollar-denominated financial system, silver's monetary history — deeper and broader than most investors realise — gives it a credibility as a reserve consideration that purely industrial metals lack.
Why Silver Benefits Differently from De-Dollarisation Than Gold
Gold's de-dollarisation benefit is direct and well-understood: central banks buy gold in large quantities as a dollar substitute. Gold reserves rise. Gold price gets structural support.
Silver's benefit from de-dollarisation is more nuanced but potentially more powerful:
Layer 1 — Direct sovereign buying: Russia's formal addition of silver to reserves. Potential follow-on from other BRICS nations. Saudi sovereign wealth entering the market. This is smaller in scale than gold's central bank buying but unprecedented in the modern era.
Layer 2 — Alternative pricing infrastructure: A BRICS precious metals exchange would create demand for physical silver outside Western exchange infrastructure — potentially removing silver from COMEX's price-setting dominance over time.
Layer 3 — Industrial demand from the transition economy: BRICS nations are building the green energy infrastructure that consumes silver at record rates. China installing record solar capacity. India's PLI solar scheme. Brazil's renewable buildout. Every panel installed in a BRICS nation represents industrial silver demand that flows outside the Western financial system.
Layer 4 — Rupee and local currency trade settlement: As India settles more trade in rupees, the domestic silver market — MCX silver, silver ETFs on NSE — becomes relatively more insulated from dollar volatility swings, while still benefiting from the structural global demand story.
Makro tracks all four layers through COMEX warehouse data, MCX silver prices, institutional positioning via CFTC, and the macro DXY signal — giving Indian investors the complete picture without monitoring multiple disconnected data sources.
The Silver Squeeze Scenario: What Sovereign Demand Could Trigger
The silver market is significantly smaller than gold. Global annual silver mine production is approximately 830-840 million ounces. Compare this to gold's 120 million ounces annually — but gold's total market value is vastly larger due to price.
In dollar terms, the silver market is perhaps 1/15th the size of gold. This means that sovereign-scale purchases — even if modest compared to gold buying — can have outsized price impacts.
Russia's $535 million allocation across three years represents perhaps 6-8 million ounces of silver annually at current prices. That sounds modest. But the silver market has been running a structural deficit of 95-200 million ounces annually for five consecutive years. Adding even one new large sovereign buyer to an already-deficit market compresses the available above-ground inventory faster.
If Russia's move serves as a template — if other BRICS nations or sovereign wealth funds follow even fractionally — the scale of potential sovereign silver demand relative to available supply is a meaningful variable. This is why silver's potential "squeeze" scenario, driven by sovereign accumulation plus industrial deficit, is discussed with increasing seriousness among physical metals analysts.
Makro tracks COMEX registered and eligible silver stocks daily — the real-time physical supply picture that would be the first place a sovereign demand squeeze would show up. For a deeper look at the current vault depletion trend, see our analysis of COMEX silver vault inventory.
What This Means for Indian Silver Investors
India sits at a unique intersection of the de-dollarisation and silver story:
- India is a BRICS+ member actively pursuing rupee trade settlement
- The RBI's gold buying sends a clear signal about India's reserve philosophy
- India's industrial silver demand from solar and electronics is rising domestically
- Silver ETFs on NSE have grown significantly, with multiple fund options now available
- The rupee's structural weakness amplifies international silver price gains for domestic investors
When sovereign interest in silver rises globally — as Russia's move signals, and as the BRICS precious metals platform would accelerate — the price signal eventually flows through to COMEX, then to MCX, then to Indian silver ETF NAVs.
The investors who understand the upstream structural shift are better positioned than those simply reacting to a daily MCX number.
The Honest Assessment: Scale and Timing Matter
Silver's role in de-dollarisation is real but should be kept in perspective.
Central bank gold buying has been running at 1,000+ tonnes annually — a scale that creates a powerful structural price floor. Silver's sovereign buying, as of March 2026, remains a fraction of that scale. Russia's allocation, while symbolically significant as the first major declaration in the modern era, does not by itself transform the silver market the way sustained central bank gold buying has transformed gold.
What Russia's move does is establish a template. It legitimises silver as a reserve consideration in the BRICS monetary conversation. It opens the door for other sovereign entities to follow. Whether that door leads to a trickle or a flood of sovereign silver buying depends on how the broader de-dollarisation architecture develops over the coming years.
The fundamental case for silver does not depend on sovereign buying accelerating quickly. The five-year supply deficit, the EV and solar industrial demand, and the Fed rate cycle are sufficient structural drivers. Sovereign buying is the emerging wildcard that adds potential upside beyond what the current consensus prices in.
Makro watches all of it — and presents the data clearly, every day.
All data and market prices referenced in this article reflect figures available as of March 2026. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Consult a SEBI-registered investment advisor before making investment decisions.