Summary
- Chainlink joined Project Pangea, a coalition of European and South Korean banks to enable real-time, stablecoin-based cross-border payments for foreign-exchange trades within a year.
- The initiative will test near-instant settlement of euro- and South Korean won-pegged stablecoins using atomic payment-versus-payment mechanisms, aiming to cut counterparty and settlement risk in a $150 billion Europe–South Korea trade corridor.
- Project Pangea is designed as middleware that lets banks utilize existing Swift and ISO 20022 systems while settling on the Pangea L1 blockchain network.
Blockchain infrastructure company Chainlink stated it is joining a group of banks that collectively represent over $10 trillion in assets under management to unlock real-time, stablecoin-based cross-border payments for foreign-exchange trades within a year.
The coalition, called Project Pangea, aims to redefine the global FX markets, Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink’s vice president of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, stated in a video interview on Tuesday. moreover to Chainlink, the group includes Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks, and UniKA, a Korean banking alliance representing more than 10 commercial banks.
The project aims to explore moving foreign-exchange settlement from a traditional 48-hour (T+2) timeline toward near-instant (T+0) settlement using regulated euro- and South Korean won-pegged stablecoins, or crypto tokens whose value is tied 1:1 to the underlying currency.
The initiative will evaluate whether the stablecoins can be exchanged through atomic payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement, in which both sides of a currency trade settle simultaneously or not at all, thereby reducing counterparty and settlement risk.
The project goes beyond a tech experiment, Ariyasinghe stated. Chainlink is drawing a line in the sand between theoretical “proofs-of-concept” and actual infrastructure.
