Chainlink joins 47 banks for real-time cross-border payments

Chainlink is joining a major international banking project that aims to radically accelerate cross-border payments. In collaboration with 47 European and South Korean banks, which together manage over $10 trillion in assets, the network seeks to settle currency transactions between the euro and the South Korean won in near real-time. The project is called Project Pangea.

Chainlink is available at OKX and Bybit.

What exactly is Project Pangea?

Project Pangea focuses on solving an old problem in the financial world: international currency transactions often take days due to the complex settlement systems used by banks. The goal of this initiative is to reduce that settlement to T+0, meaning that transactions are completed on the same day instead of after two or more business days.

To achieve this, the project relies on regulated stablecoins that represent both the euro and the South Korean won. Through these digital versions of traditional currencies, transactions can be processed directly and automatically on the blockchain, without the delays associated with conventional bank transfers.

Chainlink’s role as middleware

Chainlink fulfils a crucial technical function within Project Pangea. The network provides the middleware that converts Swift payment instructions into so-called atomic settlements on the blockchain. This means that a transaction is either fully executed or not at all, eliminating the risk of errors or partial execution.

The participating banks collectively have over $10 trillion in assets under management, making this project immediately one of the largest-scale blockchain integrations in the traditional banking sector. The collaboration shows that large financial institutions are increasingly choosing blockchain infrastructure to modernise and speed up their processes.