Assistant to the Russian President for Foreign Policy Yuri Ushakov, in an interview with TASS, spoke about the movement of the BRICS countries towards creating a payment system based on digital currencies and blockchain.

Yuri Ushakov noted that in the Johannesburg Declaration of 2023, the leaders of the BRICS countries agreed on the need to increase the volume of mutual settlements in national currencies, as well as to expand and develop correspondent relations in the banking sector and cooperation in ensuring the security of international transactions.

An independent payment system, which will be based on the most modern tools, such as digital technologies and blockchain, was identified by the participants of the XV BRICS summit as one of the important goals of the international association for the future, Ushakov said.

At the end of last year, the head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, Anatoly Aksakov stated in an interview with Izvestia that an experiment on the use of digital currency of the BRICS countries could be launched in 2025-2026.

“Proposals are now being prepared on what the digital currency of the BRICS countries might look like. Most likely, it will be tied to a basket of currencies of the participating countries. The project is supposed to be developed in stages and primarily between states that have long been participating in BRICS,” Aksakov said.

Let us recall that members of the BRICS group first began discussing the fundamental possibility of organizing payments in digital currencies back in 2020. In particular, the General Director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev, brought the idea of ​​creating a unified payment system based on blockchain and mutual settlements in cryptocurrency to the discussion of the BRICS Business Council, where it was supported by the group’s member countries.

Around the same time period, after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding within the framework of the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism, the National Department of Economic Development of Brazil, the Chinese Development Bank, Vnesheconombank of Russia, the Indian Exim Bank and the Development Bank of South Africa began joint research on distributed ledger technologies.