Chainlink has joined European and South Korean banking groups in Project Pangea, exploring stablecoin settlement for foreign exchange trades.
Chainlink News
A group of European and South Korean banks is studying whether stablecoins can speed up foreign exchange (FX) settlement. Chainlink announced on June 23 that it has joined the effort, called Project Pangea.
The working group includes South Korean digital asset infrastructure company FairSquareLab. It also includes the Unified Korea Alliance, known as UniKA, a consortium of more than a dozen Korean commercial banks, and Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks.
Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink's vice president for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, described the initiative in a video interview. He said the banks involved represent more than $10 trillion in combined assets under management.
Testing Real-Time Settlement
Project Pangea aims to evaluate direct, atomic swaps of euro- and South Korean won-denominated stablecoins. The group plans to combine Chainlink's data infrastructure with FairSquareLab's on-chain foreign exchange settlement technology.
The initiative is focused on the trade corridor between Europe and South Korea. That corridor processes over $150 billion in goods and services annually, making it one of the world's 15 largest trade routes.
The project wants to move foreign exchange settlement away from the traditional 48-hour timeline known as T+2. The target is near-instant settlement, sometimes called T+0, using regulated stablecoins whose value is tied 1:1 with the underlying currency.
Settlement would rely on atomic payment-versus-payment transactions. In this method, both sides of a currency trade settle at the same time or not at all, which reduces counterparty and settlement risk.
Industry data shows that 60% of all global stablecoin payments happen in Asia. Ariyasinghe said this points to strong demand for tokenized cash in regions where financial infrastructure is still developing.
A Working Group, Not Yet a Live Network
European banks will continue using Swift, the global messaging network they have relied on since the 1970s. Chainlink's infrastructure will translate those Swift commands into atomic swaps on a separate ledger called the Pangea L1 Network.
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Project Pangea is currently a working group rather than a live payment network, and no production timeline has been announced. Ariyasinghe said Chainlink's target is live transactions within a legal and regulatory framework within the next 12 months, with no plans to replace banks' existing payment infrastructure.
Ariyasinghe said the project is not positioned as a rival to Ripple, which has spent a decade building institutional cross-border settlement tools. He described Chainlink's role as a technology provider rather than a network builder starting from scratch.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, the global foreign exchange market processes roughly $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume. Citigroup projects the global stablecoin market will grow to $1.9 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $315 billion currently, with adoption driven partly by growing institutional use in cross-border payments.
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