Chainlink has joined forces with 47 banks in South Korea and Europe to accelerate international money transfers using stablecoins. The effort, called Project Pangea, aims to settle multimillion-dollar currency trades between the two regions in near real-time.
How Project Pangea Works
The project is built around using stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to traditional currencies — as a settlement bridge. Participating banks will issue and redeem stablecoins through Chainlink's oracle network, which handles the conversion and timing. The goal is to cut settlement times from days to minutes for large cross-border payments, a process that today often relies on slow correspondent banking chains.
The Banks Involved
The 47 institutions span South Korean and European markets, though Chainlink hasn't publicly named every lender. The group includes both commercial banks and some central bank-linked entities, according to details shared by the company. The alliance is designed to test whether stablecoins can replace the traditional SWIFT-based messaging system for high-value trades.
Why Stablecoins for Settlement
Stablecoins offer a way to avoid the volatility of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin while still using blockchain speed. In Project Pangea, the tokens will be backed by fiat reserves held at member banks. The system is expected to handle trades worth several million dollars each, with the stablecoin acting as a temporary vehicle that gets converted back to local currency within the same transaction window.
Chainlink's role is to provide tamper-proof price feeds and automate the settlement logic. The company's decentralized oracle network ensures that both sides of the trade see the same exchange rate at the same moment, removing the need for manual reconciliation.
No timeline for a commercial rollout has been announced. The project is still in a pilot phase, and the banks have not disclosed which specific currency pairs will be tested first.
