Chainlink Joins Banks in Project Pangea for Stablecoin Cross-Border Payments

Chainlink joined Project Pangea, a coalition of 47 European and South Korean banks, to test stablecoin-based settlement of foreign-exchange trades between the two regions. The initiative plans to move settlement from the traditional two-day cycle to near-instant settlement using euro- and South Korean won-pegged stablecoins.

It will evaluate atomic payment-versus-payment mechanisms that require both sides of a trade to settle simultaneously.

Pangea includes Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks, and UniKA, a Korean banking alliance representing more than 10 commercial banks. The banks in the group collectively manage more than $10 trillion in assets. Chainlink will provide infrastructure that translates existing Swift and ISO 20022 messages into transactions on the Pangea L1 blockchain network.

The project focuses on the Europe-South Korea trade corridor, which handles more than $150 billion in goods and services annually.

Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink’s vice president of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, said the target is live transactions within a legal and regulatory compliance framework within the next 12 months. The project aims to reduce liquidity costs and settlement risk for participating institutions.

"This is not just a POC," Ariyasinghe said. "Everyone's coming in with their eyes wide open. Appetite is very much about building real infrastructure ... " The group stated it is not positioning the project as a rival to existing cross-border payment networks but as a technology provider working with current bank systems.