Russia’s State Duma Deputy Chairman Alexander Babakov said Thursday that ideas on creating a new form of currency will be presented at the upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa.
“The transition to settlements in national currencies is the first step. The next is to facilitate the circulation of digital currency or any other fundamentally new form of currency in the near future,” the deputy chairman said.
Babakov said that the new currency of the new payment system will be pegged by the value of Gold, Commodities & expensive metal assets.
“Neither the euro nor the dollar are secured by anything, and our countries can do what was destroyed by the Bretton Woods system,” he added.
Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill this week called on the BRICS bloc to expand and challenge the dominance of the dollar. In a paper published in the Global Policy journal, he wrote that “the U.S. dollar plays a far too dominant role in global finance.
In a related development this week, China and Brazil reached a deal to trade in their own currencies. The move will remove the US dollar as the intermediary, further empowering both nations to distance themselves from the world’s reserve currency. The agreement will enable China and Brazil to conduct trade and financial transactions directly, without having to go through the greenback.
China is already leading the way in the development of its central bank digital currency project, and crypto adoption in Brazil is growing following the legalization of it as a payment method in the country late last year. This move further underscores the growing interest in creating alternative currencies to challenge the US dollar’s hegemony.