Blockchain infrastructure company Chainlink (LINK) announced that it has partnered with 47 banks in South Korea and Europe to enable real-time, stablecoin-based cross-border payments for international currency transactions.
The initiative, called “Project Pangea,” brings together banks with total assets of more than $10 trillion. In addition to Chainlink, the project includes Qivalis, a Eurostablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks, and UniKA, a Korean banking alliance representing more than 10 commercial banks.
Niki Aryasinghe, Chainlink’s vice president for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, said today that Project Pangea aims to redefine global currency markets. The project’s goal is to enable currency swap settlements, which previously took two business days, to be made virtually instantaneously through a regulated stablecoin pegged to the euro and Korean won.
This effort will evaluate whether stablecoins can be exchanged using an “atomic pay-to-pay” method. In this method, both sides of the currency transaction occur at the same time, or no transaction occurs at all. This reduces counterparty risk and settlement risk.
Related news 15 altcoins with rapidly increasing trading volume in South Korea: Click here for the list
Mr. Aryasinghe said Project Pangea is not just a technical test, but aims to start actual operations within the next 12 months in accordance with the legal and regulatory framework.
“This is not just a proof-of-concept study. We all know what we are doing. The focus is primarily on building the actual infrastructure. The goal is to have actual operations in place within the next 12 months, in line with legal and regulatory compliance,” he said.
The project will initially focus on the trade corridor between Europe and South Korea. The route is considered one of the top 15 trade routes in the world, with over $150 billion of trade in goods and services taking place annually. Furthermore, industry data shows that 60% of the world’s stablecoin payments take place in Asia, further underscoring the region’s importance in the sector.
Project Pangea aims to connect traditional financial institutions to a blockchain-based consensus infrastructure without completely changing existing systems. European banks will begin transacting via Swift, a global messaging network used since the 1970s. The Chainlink infrastructure then translates these commands into instantaneous atomic swap transactions on a standalone ledger called the Pangea L1 network.
This project is designed to work in accordance with Swift and ISO 20022 banking standards. This will allow traditional financial institutions to access blockchain-based consensus systems without changing their existing payment infrastructure.
Chainlink maintains that the effort should not be seen as a direct competitor to Ripple’s efforts in the corporate cross-border payments space. Aryasinghe said Chainlink is more of a technology provider in this project, and their goal is not to build a single network from scratch, but to apply technology in areas where it can create value.
*This is not investment advice.
