In the first chapter, we saw a paradox: while governments and central banks are seeking alternatives to the dollar, stablecoins are helping to digitalise it and extend it through new financial networks. But this only explains part of the story.

At the same time, gold is gaining importance, China is reducing its financial dependence on the United States and emerging economies are seeking to trade using their own currencies. There are signs of de-dollarisation, without a doubt. The question is another one: are we witnessing the end of the dollar’s hegemony or its transformation?

A hegemony that is slowly eroding

De-dollarisation is not a new phenomenon. At La Plaça, we were already analysing it years ago as a trend linked to the rise of China, economic sanctions and the desire of various powers to escape financial dependence on the United States. Since then, the process has accelerated, but not in the dramatic way that some headlines often suggest.

The latest data from the International Monetary Fund show that the dollar accounted for 56.7% of global foreign exchange reserves during the second quarter of 2026. It remains, by far, the main reserve currency, but its position has eroded compared with the share of more than 70% it held at the beginning of the century.

This decline is significant, but it must be interpreted correctly. The fact that central banks are gradually reducing the percentage of dollars in their reserves does not mean that they are massively replacing them with a new dominant currency. For the time being, neither the euro nor the yuan has managed to occupy this space. What is emerging is a more diversified system, in which states spread risks across different currencies and assets.

And this is where an old acquaintance enters the scene: gold.

Gold returns to the vaults

Central banks have once again started buying gold at a pace not seen for decades. According to the World Gold Council, over the past four years they have acquired an average of approximately 1,000 tonnes per year, twice the annual average of 500 tonnes recorded during the previous decade.

The trend continues. During the second quarter of 2026, net purchases reached 289 tonnes and, according to the organisation’s annual survey, 89% of the reserve managers surveyed expect central bank gold reserves to continue increasing over the next twelve months. Some 45% say that their own institution plans to buy more.

It is not difficult to understand why. A US Treasury bond is an asset denominated in dollars and ultimately linked to the United States financial system. Gold is not the liability of any government. It does not depend on the solvency of an issuer and, if it is held within the country itself, it does not require foreign financial infrastructure in order to exist either. This characteristic has gained importance in a world in which finance has also become a geopolitical weapon.

When the dollar is also power

The turning point came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The United States, the European Union and their allies froze a substantial share of the assets of the Central Bank of Russia held abroad. Beyond the political justification for the sanctions, the message to the rest of the world was unequivocal: international reserves are not necessarily neutral when a geopolitical conflict erupts.

For China, Russia and other countries that can imagine a future confrontation with Washington, this realisation changes the calculation. The question is no longer only which asset offers greater returns or liquidity, but to what extent it is prudent to depend on a financial system controlled by a potential adversary.

This helps explain the interest in gold, but also the efforts to use local currencies in bilateral trade. China has promoted the international use of the yuan, while the BRICS have made reducing dependence on the dollar a recurring part of the debate about a more multipolar world order. However, wanting to reduce a dependency is much easier than replacing the system that created it.

The problem of finding a substitute

The dollar’s hegemony does not exist simply because the United States is the leading Western power. Behind it lies one of the deepest and most liquid financial markets in the world, a large supply of dollar-denominated assets and decades of integration of trade, credit and international finance around the US currency.

This network generates an effect that is difficult to break. A company accepts dollars because it knows that its suppliers will also accept them. A bank provides financing in dollars because there is demand. And investors buy assets denominated in this currency because there is an enormous market in which they can sell them when they need to.

It is the same principle that explains why it is so difficult to replace a dominant social network or digital platform: its value does not depend only on the technology, but on how many people already use it.

The yuan, for example, is backed by the second-largest economy on the planet and has extraordinary weight in global trade, but China maintains capital controls and a financial system that is far more heavily managed than that of the United States. The euro has an enormous economic market behind it, but it does not have a single sovereign asset comparable in scale and depth to US federal debt. And gold, despite regaining prominence as a store of value, can hardly replace on its own the credit infrastructure needed to keep the world economy moving.

For this reason, the future may be less revolutionary and, at the same time, more profound than it seems.

From hegemony to a multipolar world

It is possible that no currency will emerge capable of dethroning the dollar overnight. What may be emerging is a more fragmented monetary system: more gold in reserves, more commercial transactions in local currencies, more yuan in certain regions and, in parallel, a dollar that continues to dominate large areas of international finance and that, as we saw in the first chapter, is finding new avenues for digital expansion.

This forces us to qualify the very concept of de-dollarisation. We are not necessarily facing a substitution, but rather a diversification of monetary power. The dollar can lose relative market share without ceasing to be indispensable. And this difference is fundamental, because hegemonies rarely disappear the moment they begin to retreat. They often first go through a long period in which they coexist with the systems attempting to replace them.

The big unknown is how far this transformation can go. If more countries trade with one another without using the dollar, accumulate gold and develop alternative financial systems, Washington will have less capacity to turn its currency into an instrument of power. But for this autonomy to be real, changing the currency used in a transaction is not enough. It is also necessary to decide through which infrastructure this money will circulate. And this is where the monetary war enters a new dimension.

Because a country can pay in yuan, euros, rupees or dollars, but power does not reside solely in the name of the currency. It also resides in the banks that process the transaction, the networks that transmit the instructions, the clearing houses that settle the payments and the jurisdictions capable of blocking them. Perhaps, therefore, the defining question of the 21st century will not be which currency dominates the world. It will be who controls the pipes through which money flows?

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