Snippings

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What chance of a new Brics currency backed by gold?

There has been speculation that a desire to avoid the dollar might encourage the launch of a gold-backed Brics currency, and that this might become a rival trade currency to the dollar and an eventual home for foreign exchange reserves.

This is unlikely. The Brics nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and, since 2024, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran and Indonesia) are a heterogenous group, with differing objectives and – in the case of India and China – significant rivalries. This is not an obvious starting point for a shared currency project.

The issues involved in establishing any kind of Brics currency (gold-linked or otherwise) would be enormous. Further talk of adding nations to the Brics group would increase complexity and reduce the probability of a new currency arrangement. It will not be taking a share of the foreign exchange reserves pie in the next decade.

The conclusion must be that dollar dominance will continue to erode due to further weaponisation of the currency. But even if the weight of the greenback falls to 50%, primary dominance will be maintained because there will not be a single challenger from the pack. Instead, the next 10 years will see 10 currencies each take a small slice of the next 10% of dollar erosion.

From: Which currencies will benefit from dollar erosion? – OMFIF.

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Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) focuses on connecting AI models to external tools and data. Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol aims to standardize communication directly between agents. The AGNTCY collective is building a comprehensive infrastructure suite, envisioning an “Internet of Agents”.

From: Comparing MCP, A2A, and AGNTCY in the AI Agent Ecosystem | by Omar Santos | May, 2025 | Medium.

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The prolonged operational failure of the ECB’s Target 2 (T2) system, which underpins critical financial transactions within the Eurozone, has exacerbated doubts about the institution’s technical and operational resilience, raising questions about its capacity to govern a central bank digital currency (CBDC) effectively.
The T2 system, which processes high-value payments integral to European banking liquidity –  €3 trillion ($3.12 trillion) of daily payments and financial trades – experienced a severe outage last month, rendering interbank settlements inoperable for an entire business day.

While ECB officials assert that the digital euro would function via the separate TIPS (TARGET Instant Payment Settlement) system – purportedly designed to ensure uninterrupted transaction capabilities – critics argue that the fundamental reliability of ECB-operated financial networks remains uncertain

From: The digital euro is now a greater imperative than ever.

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The big thing in the next few years for Prajit Nanu, co-founder and CEO of Nium, will be “treasury optimisation”. He explained: “Actually that’s going to be convergence of lot of buzzwords, which is real time, payments, open banking, AI and stablecoins.”

From: Money20/20 Europe 2025 – What Happened on Day One | The Fintech Times.

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The Chicago Sun-Times “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist. The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. In fact a check by Ars Technica showed that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist.

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MCP (Model Context Protocol) is essentially a protocol for tool access. It defines a standard way for large language models to interact with various tools, data, and resources. In simple terms, MCP enables AI to use various functions, just like a programmer calls a function.
While A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) focuses on agent collaboration, it establishes a way for intelligent agents to discover, communicate and cooperate with each other

From: A2A + MCP + LangChain = Powerful Agent Communication | by Gao Dalie (高達烈) | May, 2025 | Towards AI.

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Google announced its “Shop with AI Mode” which brings agentic capabilities to e-commerce. Is it really a stretch for Google to do this with bank rates, car loans, or other financial decisions?

Google can do this without ever touching a user’s assets. All they need to do is direct them to another bank. What bank can survive this?

It’s just a matter of time before Google, Robinhood, or Revolut brings agents to financial decision-making for the masses.

From: For Banks The AI Reckoning Is Now.

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In their superb National Bureau of Economic Research paper on “The Digitalization of Money” (working paper 26300, September 2019) Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau discuss how innovation unbundles the functions of money and, as they put it, renders the competition between currencies “much fiercer”. Then they go on to discuss the role of platforms (ie, two-sided markets where buyers and sellers exchange multiple products) and explore their interaction with digital currencies.

Their point is that digital currencies associated with platforms (what I called a form of “community currency” in my book) will be far more differentiated than currencies are today because they will differ not only in their monetary functions but also in the functions provided by the associated platforms. As they put it, “a currency’s appeal will likely be governed by other platform features such as information processing algotithms, its data privacy policies and the set of counterparts available on the platform”. This is a really interesting perspective on the dynamics of digital currency and has set me thinking about how both governments and businesses will deal with the digital currencies.

Privacy? Reputation? Relationships? It’s almost as if it’s identity that is new… well, you know.

From: (3) Digital gold for a digital world? – by David G.W. Birch.

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With a stable coin, we have a cryptocurrency where (it is hoped) there are enough reserves to pay everyone back, whereas a Central Bank promises to pay the bearer for the fiat currency (and hopefully has the reserves to pay for this).

From: The Future of Payments? To CBDC or Not to CBDC. That is the question | by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE | Jun, 2025 | Medium.

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I’m not the only person who was wondering about this. The noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows more about the web than I ever will, and back in 2012 he told a Wired magazine conference in New York that “we should have built payments in the browser”.

(They got half way, because buried in your browser, in addition to the familiar error 404 for page-not-found, there is also error 402 for page-requires-payment. But no payment mechanism was provided.)

I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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