Pangea Today: 47 Banks + Chainlink Try to Make 48-Hour FX Settle in Under a Minute 🪙

Chainlink has joined a coalition of European and South Korean banks under a working group called Project Pangea, aiming to test stablecoin-based foreign exchange settlement between the euro and the South Korean won. The initiative was announced Tuesday alongside South Korean digital asset infrastructure company FairSquareLab, Qivalis — a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks — and the Unified Korea Alliance (UniKA), a consortium that includes more than a dozen Korean commercial banks. The group collectively represents more than $10 trillion in assets under management, according to Chainlink.

Project Pangea will evaluate direct, atomic swaps of euro- and won-denominated stablecoins using Chainlink's data infrastructure paired with FairSquareLab's onchain FX settlement technology. The goal is to shift FX settlement from the traditional 48-hour (T+2) timeline toward near-instant (T+0) settlement through atomic payment-versus-payment (PvP) mechanisms, in which both sides of a currency trade settle simultaneously or not at all, reducing counterparty and settlement risk. Chainlink's vice president of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Niki Ariyasinghe, said the project is intended as production-grade infrastructure rather than a pilot. "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 target is live transactions within a legal, regulatory compliance framework within the next 12 months."

The initiative targets the Europe–South Korea trade corridor, which processes more than $150 billion in goods and services annually. Project Pangea is structured as middleware designed to let banks use existing Swift and ISO 20022 systems while settling on the Pangea L1 blockchain network. No production implementation timeline has been announced, and the group is operating as a working group rather than a live payment network. The Bank for International Settlements estimates the global foreign exchange market processes roughly $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume.

The project reflects a broader push by financial institutions to evaluate stablecoins for wholesale infrastructure rather than consumer payments. Fintech startup OpenFX recently raised $94 million to expand its stablecoin-based payments network, with an initial focus on Southeast Asia and Latin America. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently described stablecoins as having a "ChatGPT moment" as more financial institutions evaluate how the technology could fit into their operations. Citigroup projects the global stablecoin market will grow to $1.9 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $315 billion today, with an optimistic forecast of as much as $4 trillion by 2030, driven by continued adoption within crypto markets, a gradual shift from physical US dollar banknotes to digital dollars and the growing use of stablecoins as a store of short-term liquidity in both US dollars and local currencies.