ORBIT: Open Reconciliation for Balanced International Trade

The current international trade system relies heavily on the U.S.\ dollar as its primary settlement currency, granting the United States asymmetric structural privileges while exposing other nations to exchange rate risk, imported inflation, and systemic vulnerability to U.S.\ monetary policy cycles. This paper proposes ORBIT (Open Reconciliation for Balanced International Trade), a conceptual framework for international trade settlement that eliminates the need for any reserve currency. ORBIT introduces a neutral, fixed unit of account called Sol, used solely for pricing international trade contracts. Under this framework, no money crosses national borders: exporters and importers transact entirely in their domestic currencies through national clearing institutions, while the Sol ledger serves purely as an informational bridge recording trade flows between nations. Trade imbalances are absorbed through routine domestic financial operations by each country's central bank. The framework requires no world central bank, no new currency, no sovereignty concession, and no global political consensus. Any two countries can begin a bilateral pilot immediately. This paper presents the conceptual design, analyzes its economic properties, compares it with existing alternatives, illustrates the mechanism through a numerical example, and discusses implementation pathways. The author invites formal modeling, quantitative analysis, and critical discussion from the academic community.