Have you ever thought that the money behind a tank of gas you fill may have nothing to do with dollars?
Many people think this is a joke.
After all, “Oil can only be bought and sold in U.S. dollars” is an iron rule that has been believed in the global financial circle for more than 50 years.
But in early April 2026, a set of data directly tore this iron law open – not a crack, but a door.
On April 2, China’s RMB Cross-border Payment System (CIPS) processed a single-day transaction volume of 1.22 trillion yuan, with the number of transactions approaching 42,000. Both data set new historical records.
Go back one month and look: the average daily transaction volume of CIPS in March was 920.5 billion yuan, with an average of 35,700 transactions per day.
Going back further, the daily average in February was only 619.7 billion yuan, with less than 26,000 transactions.
It surged nearly 50% in one month and doubled in two months.
What force is behind this push?
The answer comes from the Middle East.
One data is enough to explain it all – as of the end of March 2026, the proportion of RMB settlement in the Middle East’s crude oil trade with China has officially exceeded 41%, and the proportion of US dollars has dropped to 52%.
Taking it apart, the changes are more intuitive: Iran’s crude oil to China has been settled 100% in RMB, completely bypassing the SWIFT system; Iraq has exceeded 60%, and Saudi Arabia has approximately 45%.
Among them, Saudi Arabia’s turn is the most interesting.
In June 2024, the tacit agreement of “oil for security” between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which had lasted for 50 years, expired. Saudi Arabia directly chose not to renew the agreement and turned to using RMB, euro, Japanese yen and other currencies for oil trade settlement.
By February 2026, the proportion of Saudi Aramco’s crude oil exports to China will be settled in RMB at around 45%.
The 50-year-old rule is no longer allowed.
Why are Middle Eastern countries willing to accept RMB?
To put it bluntly, it’s not a relationship, it’s a business.
China is the world’s largest oil importer, with a deep wallet and stable demand.
After oil-producing countries receive RMB, they don’t have to worry about having nowhere to spend it – they can buy Chinese goods, invest in Chinese assets, and directly exchange RMB for real gold in the gold market.
In 2025, the delivery warehouse established by the Shanghai Gold Exchange in Saudi Arabia completed the world’s first transaction of RMB against physical gold.
A closed loop is moving from concept to reality.
This closed loop also has a financial endorsement – Standard Chartered Bank estimates that if the data from the CIPS system are included, the actual proportion of RMB used in global payments is about 7%, which is much higher than the 3.10% calculated by SWIFT.
A considerable number of RMB cross-border transactions do not use SWIFT at all, and traditional statistical methods have long underestimated the true international use of RMB.
So, should the petrodollar be renamed the petroyuan?
This question itself oversimplifies the problem.
The U.S. dollar remains the absolute main force in global oil trade today.
During the war, its hedging properties were even more amplified – whenever there was gunfire in the Middle East, funds would flow back into U.S. dollar assets like a conditioned reflex. This is something engraved in the DNA of global finance.
The RMB is not here to “replace” the US dollar.
A statement that is closer to the truth is: there was only one way in the past 50 years, but now there is an additional way.
The internationalization of the RMB has never happened overnight, but judging from the explosive growth of CIPS data and the successive actions of oil-producing countries to switch settlement methods, change is not about to happen – it is already halfway there.
The number 1.22 trillion will most likely be set a new record next week or next month.
But when it appears in April 2026, it is destined to be written into the historical coordinates of the changes in the global currency landscape – from this day on, there will finally be a path between oil and the renminbi that does not have to go through the U.S. dollar.
