Chainlink ropes in 50+ banks to make FX settlement atomic — euros, won, no waiting 🌍

Chainlink has joined a working group with European and South Korean banking organizations to explore stablecoin-based foreign exchange settlement, the company announced Tuesday. The initiative, dubbed Project Pangea, links Chainlink with FairSquareLab, the Unified Korea Alliance (UniKA) — a consortium of more than a dozen Korean commercial banks — and Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks. The group will evaluate direct, atomic swaps between euro- and South Korean won-denominated stablecoins, combining Chainlink's data infrastructure with FairSquareLab's onchain FX settlement technology.

The effort is positioned as a working group rather than a live payment network, and no production implementation timeline has been announced. It reflects a broader push by financial institutions to test tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins as wholesale infrastructure for cross-border settlement rather than consumer payments. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the global foreign exchange market processes roughly $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume.

Stablecoins are drawing renewed interest from banks and corporations as regulatory frameworks clarify in the United States, Europe and other major financial hubs. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently described stablecoins as having a "ChatGPT moment" as more institutions evaluate the technology. Citigroup projects the global stablecoin market will grow to $1.9 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $315 billion today, with a most optimistic forecast of $4 trillion, driven by crypto market adoption, a shift from physical US dollar banknotes to digital dollars, and growing use of stablecoins as short-term liquidity in dollars and local currencies.

Other firms are pursuing similar infrastructure plays. Fintech startup OpenFX recently raised $94 million to expand its stablecoin-based payments network, with an initial focus on Southeast Asia and Latin America. Separately, Brazil has barred crypto settlement in regulated cross-border payment rails, and Malta has proposed a DeFi rulebook covering DAOs under its MiCA-era framework. Project Pangea adds to a widening patchwork of experiments as banks weigh how onchain settlement can plug into existing correspondent banking systems.