ICYMI: How BRICS Pay Will Accelerate De-Dollarization

While the Georgian election and U.S. elections drew much of our news bandwidth over the last two weeks, the BRICS Summit in Kazan was a truly historic event. Perhaps not on par with the post World War I Versailles Conference that redrew the maps of Europe (today being the eve of Remembrance Day) or the Bretton Woods conference late in World War II that confirmed the U.S. dollar replacing the Pound Sterling as the postwar world reserve currency. But it was certainly a major step for the BRICS+ members in de-dollarizing their trade. Which as mentioned in the previous article by our Cairo-based MENA Editor Ahmed, may prove vital to the economic health of BRICS+ member nations like Egypt who find themselves chronically short on dollars and euros which they must painstakingly earn, as opposed to the U.S. Treasury and the European Central Bank who have abused the exorbitant privilege of simply printing greenbacks and bluebacks.

The above video was linked up 12 days ago on his Rumble channel by our buddy AmericanVillages.ru founder Tim Kirby, who very much wanted to attend the recent BRICS Summit, but was unable to do so. One of our mutual friends with ESW Eurasia Editor Stanislav Krapivnik did in fact get to attend the media tent and press conferences at the summit—and we intend to speak with that person about their experience in Kazan very soon. But the main point of Tim's video which we'll clip at our ESW TikTok channel is that there are multiple channels through which the problems of establishing de-dollarized and de-SWIFTed payments are being approached, including via BRICS Pay which should work in multiple member nations from Ethiopia to China.

There's also work underway to address the widely ballyhooed by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal tendency of a few Chinese banks to stop clearing Russian transactions for fear of U.S. sanctions (many other Chinese banks completely ignore U.S. secondary sanctions threats including in their transactions with Iran). Tim mentions one of the proposed solutions for bypassing U.S. sanctions and dollar hegemony is the non-profit UNIT ecosystem which he discovered via James Roguski's Substack.

UNIT proposes a crypto currency backed 60% by a basket of member currencies and 40% by GOLD. You can read the UNIT whitepaper published on the auspicious Russian holiday of May 9th, 2023 here. The TLDR summary is here:

We propose a solution to the alternative global currency problem by introducing an independent decentralized fractal monetary framework which avoids using national currencies for international trade and reserves.

Each UNIT token represents a proportional share of the basket of underlying assets, containing gold and local currencies. New transactional units can be minted at the node level without the need for a central emitting authority or coordination among the issuers of underlying currencies by exchanging a replica of the basket for new UNIT tokens.

With further resilience enhancements, the UNIT ecosystem may reach the level of robustness sufficient to continue functioning in scenarios of extreme disruptions and conflicts.

Looking up the UnitFoundation.org website, one of the listed co founders is Alexey Subbotin, a Russian entrepreneur with a strong financial services background, and the other is ethnic Chinese if not a citizen of the PRC, Ji Luo. However, Alasdair McLeod of Goldmoney wrote about his doubts surrounding the UNIT token concept in September 2024, weeks before the Kazan summit. What's clear is that UNIT token is a private rather than governmental initiative proposing a solution to the dollar reliance/USD reserves requirement problem that nations like Egypt or Ethiopia run into when conducting international trade. Sergey Glazyev, an influential Russian Eurasianist and economist we started writing about over ten years ago in October 2014 (a few weeks after we met VJ Varghese) for a predecessor site to RogueESW RogueMoney.net, has been working on the intergovernmental aspects of this. Glazyev's work according to Sputnik News includes solving Russia's Indian rupee accumulation issue in the burgeoning oil and LNG trade with the world's most populous nation.

We have emailed Ji Luo at his UNIT Foundation address to invite him on the ESW webcast. We're interested in discussing UNIT both as a specific token and the general concept of a BRICS+ basket of currencies backed by gold. Even though UNIT is a private initiative we stress, it may very well be piloting a concept that will be adopted in some form by the BRICS nations.