Disintermediation of International Settlements in Emerging Multipolar World
Authors: Kunitsyna N. , Dyudikova E. 
Published: October 2024

In the context of general globalization, the information society in digital realities faced the problem of ensuring national sovereignty. On the one hand, the threat to the banking system is the expanding ecosystem of alternative finance on the sidelines of the metaverse. On the other hand, the problem is aggravated by the forced localization and segmentation of the settlement and payment space: there are negative consequences of the payment systems dependence on the political beliefs of their administrators. As a result, the focus on the world multipolarity required the response of government agencies in the vector of searching for a digital channel for cross-border movement of monetary value. The attractiveness of the digital trusted environment is embodied in the “ideology+technology” complex. There are two approaches to integrating high-tech innovations into the global financial system: a) conformist, when only the technological component with the predominant preservation of the traditional economic structure is taken into account, and b) eccentric, combining fourth-generation web technologies and classical elements of centralization in the focus of the inextricable link between technology and innovation ideology. The authors conclude that the centralization characteristic of the first approach transforms high-tech innovation with its loss of specific features. This makes the solution (legitimate settlement stablecoin) unpromising. This implementation of the “digital” settlement format not only does not facilitate the design by disintermediation and providing users with the opportunity to directly participate in the movement of value, but, on the contrary, complicates it by entering additional participants. The search for selfsufficient conservative tools for cross-border transfers is archaism: the global digitalization race suggests that in the foreseeable future, no leading country will cede its leading position in the segment of supranational digital settlements, recognizing and accepting a competitor’s digital (crypto) asset as a potential impetus to currency hegemony. A nontrivial solution to the second approach is a digital service like a data container that officially translates the key values of the digital world into a trusted web 4.0 environment. It will provide participants in the international “digital” union with information exchange with a guarantee of independence through financial decisions at the national level. At the same time, the number of transfer stages using smart contracts is reduced, and the applying of artificial intelligence and smart analysis tools has a high potential to improve the quality of control and monitoring. Thus, during the period of expanding the opportunities of the virtual world, the role of metaverse as a new format of interaction is growing, capable of uniting participants at a new level of the settlement and payment space organization. It is advisable not to localize the new formation, but to segment it according to national characteristics with a guarantee of its international interactivity.