Chainlink has joined forces with banking consortia from Europe and South Korea to launch Project Pangea. The initiative seeks to enable near-instantaneous settlement of euro-to-South Korean won foreign exchange transactions using regulated stablecoins, replacing the traditional multi-day delays that currently characterize much of the global FX market.
Traditional FX settlements often operate on a T+2 cycle, meaning trades can take up to two business days to finalize. This delay creates counterparty and settlement risks for banks and their clients, particularly in high-volume corridors such as the Europe-South Korea trade route.
Project Pangea aims to compress this timeline to T+0 — essentially real-time or same-day atomic settlement — by facilitating direct swaps between compliant EUR-pegged and KRW-pegged stablecoins.
The project brings together more than 50 financial institutions collectively managing over $10 trillion in assets under management.
On the European side, Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 leading banks, participates.
In South Korea, UniKA (Unified Korea Alliance) coordinates the effort, with a steering committee that includes Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, Kbank, FairSquareLab, and OBDIA, plus more than 10 additional commercial banks.
FairSquareLab, a Korean digital asset infrastructure provider, contributes its onchain FX settlement technology.
At the core of the solution is Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network, which supplies reliable off-chain data, cross-chain interoperability, and smart contract orchestration.
These capabilities integrate with ISO 20022 messaging standards and existing Swift infrastructure.
The result is a Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) mechanism that allows banks to exchange the two stablecoins atomically — ensuring one leg of the trade settles only if the other does — without relying on intermediary bridge currencies.
By enabling direct, bilateral stablecoin swaps, Project Pangea reduces operational friction, lowers costs associated with prolonged settlement periods, and minimizes exposure to market volatility during the settlement window.
Participants expect the framework to enhance efficiency and transparency across international FX flows while leveraging regulated digital assets that maintain full fiat backing and compliance.
The announcement was made in Zurich, highlighting growing institutional interest in bringing traditional capital markets onchain.
Industry professionals now generally view the collaboration as part of a broader trend where established banks explore tokenized assets and blockchain infrastructure to streamline global payments and foreign exchange.
If successful, the project could serve as a blueprint for other currency pairs and corridors, accelerating the adoption of stablecoin-based settlement models in regulated finance. While still in the development and testing phase, Project Pangea appears to demonstrate how decentralized technology can complement, rather than replace, legacy banking rails to deliver improved cross-border transactions.
