4.1 Who are the target buyers?
Retail and Institutional investors
Subject to clearing KYC/KYB checks, $BRICS is accessible to both institutional and retail investors. Investors hold the token for two reasons: arbitrage yield and capital relief. Thus, $BRICS plays a dual role: (a) as a quadratic measure of CDS revenue and (b) as a governance token that determines where credit risk is offloaded
The former seeks crypto-native value accrual with real-world impact. The latter sees $BRICS foremost as a governance token, offering pro-rata governance rights to critical collateral and bank credit-enhancement decisions.
$BRICS holders are segmented into three non-exclusive categories below:
Motivated by capital relief and governance:
Banks: Credit Portfolio Managers, like Nhlanganiso Kunene, Head of Debt Capital Markets at Nedbank, represent the 'investor-face' of commercial banks with trade finance portfolios. Nedbank Group Limited is a $7.5 billion market-cap bank operating in five African countries within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region including 2 BRICS nations. Its 21% shareholding in Ecobank extends its presence to 39 other African countries. Nhlanganiso seeks both regulatory capital relief and governance arbitrage through $BRICS.
Motivated by regulatory arbitrage and compliance:
Underwriters and insurers seek ever-green CDS markets to govern and buy out. Think here of Nsika Mosondo, Chief Financial Officer of the ‘Old Mutual-NASASA Facility’. Nsika provides the full notional guarantee on bank-originated credit. Why? Old Mutual is a multi-line insurer and bank ($ 4 billion market cap) operating across Africa and Asia. Nsika is buying a 'token warrant': the option to govern at least $500 million in trade finance over Africa and Asia. This is a strategic governance advantage which, as a bank, he cannot exercise through equity post 2008 regulations. The cost of the opportunity is minimised through an AI-selected CDS portfolio, which Nsika deems superior to industry-standard Logit predictions of risk. Consider the calculus: Nsika believes a $500 million guarantee can bootstrap a $2 billion guarantee for the bank within 2 years through CDS-reinvestments. The expected loss is $7 million; the net benefit is over $400 million in protocol profits, compliant governance rights, and earned credit fees for the bank.
Stablecoin issuers that require compliant collateral and institutional-grade yield-enhancement, like Tether. One might also view this as a hedge against non-compliant p2p stablecoin payments (yet long on dollar hegemony).
Hedge Funds: asset managers like Blackrock are increasingly seeking compliant crypto-native yield and leverage through synthetic risk transfer.
Motivated by real-world impact, crypto-native transparency and capital redistribution
Crypto Funds: ‘bullish’ that PayFi has ‘product market fit’ and seeking an iteration into ‘regulatory arbitrage’ in a post-Trump era.
Family Offices: long on dollar hegemony yet seeking censorship-resistant value accrual.
Retail investors: attracted to the real-world use case and memetic quality of “BRICS bonds”, “Nike bonds”, etc. Prototypical is Noah Tweedale of Pump.fun (a meme coin launchpad targeting retail investors). There is also socio-political (PolitFi) appeal to a 'BRICS' token that captures the increasing manufacturing strength of the Global South and BRICS in particular.
Interestingly, the supply side of CDS premiums (banks seeking risk transfer) is also a critical demand side (banks seeking $BRICS as a means of governance arbitrage). This reflexive relationship was imposed by the Bank of International Settlements post-2008: banks are restricted from owning more than 20% in SPV equity underwriting risk transfer despite the need to manage risk mitigation. This enables third-party brokerages like ChinaAI to sell tokenised governance instead, enabling banks to bypass regulatory restrictions.
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