Keynes's Bancor[1] was essentially this idea, but Bretton Woods conference rejected this proposal. Oil exporting and general surplus nations, like Russia and China, have been moving in this direction by reserving more gold in recent years (look up various European nation increasing gold purchases since 2008) likely to move towards a more multilateral system of settling trade imbalances with a neutral settlement asset, rather than stockpiling fiat currency or fiat currency debt "assets" created in unrestricted supply by one nation, who forces world to then use this inflating currency to purchase energy... which equals future inflation for these nations that can't print it themselves.
It is also useful as a personal "store of value" to avoid "saving" in a depreciating fiat currency, along with other "hard" assets.
But gold or hard money cannot be the unit of account or medium of exchange for national commerce. Credit/fiat is better for this.
This is why some have argued that there's always been and probably always will be a need for "two monies". Bimetallism was an embodiment of this principle. Here is a very thorough discussion of this concept[0]. Ctrl+F "two monies" for specifics, but the whole article is insightful.
This dynamic also presents itself in debates about crypto currencies purpose to function as a high throughput transaction currency or a more inert store of value. Because of the inefficiencies of blockchain and Bitcoin's finite quantity, it cannot function as a unit of account or high volume transactions currency; fiat and fiat derivative platforms (Cash App, Paypal, credit cards, etc) are much better at serving this function. Trying to shoe-horn hard money into soft money use cases (or vice versa, saving in fiat) doesn't work. One form of "money" can't satisfy these two distinct functions.
[0] http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...
