Chainlink Joins Banking Groups on Stablecoin FX Settlement

Chainlink has joined Project Pangea, an initiative led by European and South Korean banking groups to explore the use of stablecoins in foreign exchange settlement. The project aims to move away from the traditional 48-hour timeline for settlement (T+2) and towards near-instant settlement using regulated stablecoins tied 1:1 with underlying currencies.

The working group includes Chainlink, South Korean digital asset infrastructure company FairSquareLab, UniKA (a consortium of over a dozen Korean commercial banks), and Qivalis (a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks). Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink's vice president for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, described the initiative as focused on the trade corridor between Europe and South Korea, which processes over $150 billion in goods and services annually.

The project plans to combine Chainlink's data infrastructure with FairSquareLab's on-chain foreign exchange settlement technology. Settlement would rely on atomic payment-versus-payment transactions, reducing counterparty and settlement risk. Ariyasinghe noted that 60% of all global stablecoin payments occur in Asia, pointing to strong demand for tokenized cash in regions where financial infrastructure is still developing.

Project Pangea currently exists as a working group rather than a live payment network, with no production timeline announced. However, Ariyasinghe targets live transactions within a legal and regulatory framework within the next 12 months, without plans to replace banks' existing payment infrastructure.