Chainlink Labs, a consortium of 37 European banks operating under the Qivalis banner, and UniKA — a South Korean banking alliance anchored by Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, and Kbank — announced Project Pangea on June 23, 2026. The initiative targets T+0 atomic settlement for foreign-exchange trades betw...
"This is not just a POC. Everyone's coming in with their eyes wide open. Appetite is very much about building real infrastructure." — Niki Ariyasinghe, VP Asia-Pacific & Middle East, Chainlink Labs
Chainlink Labs, a consortium of 37 European banks operating under the Qivalis banner, and UniKA — a South Korean banking alliance anchored by Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, and Kbank — announced Project Pangea on June 23, 2026. The initiative targets T+0 atomic settlement for foreign-exchange trades between the euro and the South Korean won, a $150 billion annual trade corridor currently operating on T+2 cycles.
The project assembles 47 financial institutions with collective assets exceeding $10 trillion. It is designed as middleware that integrates with existing Swift and ISO 20022 messaging systems, settling on a purpose-built Pangea L1 blockchain. Live transactions are targeted within 12 months.
The announcement arrives at a specific inflection point: a June 2026 Bank for International Settlements study found that 64% of currency trades globally still face Herstatt risk — the exposure that one leg of a trade settles while the other does not. Project Pangea's atomic payment-versus-payment mechanism is engineered to eliminate that risk entirely for its corridor.
Project Pangea operates on a three-layer model that separates messaging, connectivity, and settlement into distinct functional tiers:
Layer 1 — Banking Systems. Existing bank infrastructure remains unchanged. Trade instructions travel via Swift messaging using the ISO 20022 standard. No bank is required to replace or overhaul its core systems.
Layer 2 — Connectivity. Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Data Streams serve as the bridge between legacy banking rails and on-chain settlement. CCIP processed more than $18 billion in cross-chain transfer volume in March 2026, a 62% increase from February, and has recorded zero major exploits since its mainnet launch.
Layer 3 — Settlement. Smart contracts on the Pangea L1 blockchain execute atomic payment-versus-payment swaps. Both legs of a currency trade settle simultaneously, or neither does. Pangea L1 is structured as jurisdictionally neutral ground — not domiciled in either Europe or South Korea — to avoid regulatory conflicts between the two counterparty jurisdictions. Settlement also extends to Ethereum and Polygon chains where required.
FairSquareLab, a Seoul-based fintech on the steering committee, provides the on-chain FX settlement engine, which uses a Proactive Market Maker (PMM) model for liquidity provisioning. This differs from the automated market maker (AMM) designs common in DeFi, optimizing instead for institutional-grade order execution and price stability.
The 47 institutions span two continents and two distinct consortia:
Qivalis (Europe): Incorporated in Amsterdam in December 2025, Qivalis started with 12 founding banks and expanded to 37 members after adding 25 banks in May 2026. Named members include BNP Paribas, BBVA, CaixaBank, ING, UniCredit, Danske Bank, DekaBank, DZ BANK, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB, and Banca Sella. The consortium operates under Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) supervision and is pursuing MiCAR authorization.
UniKA (South Korea): The Unified Korea Alliance is governed by a five-entity steering committee: Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, Kbank, FairSquareLab, and OBDIA. Ten additional Korean commercial banks participate. Separately, KB Kookmin, Woori, NongHyup, Industrial Bank of Korea, Suhyup, and Standard Chartered Korea have announced plans for a won-backed stablecoin, indicating broader industry alignment in Seoul toward bank-issued digital currency.
The combined participant base holds over $10 trillion in assets under management, according to the project's press release.
Two regulated stablecoins underpin the settlement mechanism:
Euro stablecoin (Qivalis). Scheduled for launch in H2 2026. Reserves will be backed 1:1, with at least 40% held as bank deposits and the remainder in high-quality, short-term euro-area sovereign bonds diversified across EU member states. The structure is designed for MiCAR compliance.
Won-pegged stablecoin. FairSquareLab provides the liquidity infrastructure. South Korea's Digital Asset and Cryptocurrency Act creates a regulatory pathway for bank-led stablecoin issuance, though authorization timelines remain unconfirmed.
The design eliminates intermediary currencies. Current EUR/KRW trades typically route through USD as a bridge currency, adding conversion costs, settlement delays, and counterparty exposure at each leg. Project Pangea proposes direct EUR-KRW atomic swaps, cutting the transaction chain from multiple intermediaries to zero.
Jean-Luc Gustave of Qivalis stated that the project "could position the euro stablecoin at the heart of institutional FX innovation." Joonhong Kim of FairSquareLab said it "opens a path for the Korean won to connect more directly with global currency markets."
The global FX market processes approximately $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Despite decades of infrastructure investment, settlement risk persists at structural levels:
The won's exclusion from CLS is a structural factor. Korea's capital flow regulations and time-zone positioning make it difficult to integrate into CLS's existing settlement windows. Project Pangea addresses this gap by creating a parallel settlement mechanism purpose-built for the EUR/KRW corridor.
The Europe-South Korea trade corridor processes $150 billion annually in goods and services. An additional observation from Chainlink's press materials: 60% of global stablecoin payments already occur in Asia, suggesting regional demand for blockchain-based settlement infrastructure.
Project Pangea extends Chainlink's positioning as infrastructure for institutional finance. CCIP's current institutional deployments include:
Fernando Vazquez of Chainlink Labs described the project as upgrading "fragmented FX models with direct, atomic currency swaps using stablecoins."
For Chainlink, the economic model is straightforward: CCIP charges per-message and per-transfer fees. Scaling to institutional FX volumes — even a fraction of the $9.6 trillion daily market — would represent a step-change in protocol revenue compared to current DeFi-native usage.
Project Pangea does not operate in a vacuum. Several competing or complementary settlement architectures are active:
CLS Group settles $8+ trillion daily but covers only 18 currencies. It does not settle KRW. Its PvP model is proven but operates on fixed settlement windows, not real-time.
Canton Network, backed by Digital Asset and a consortium including Goldman Sachs, processes $8 trillion in monthly repo settlement as of mid-2026. Canton focuses on tokenized securities rather than FX, but its institutional credibility and throughput represent an adjacent competitive force.
Swift remains the dominant messaging layer for interbank communication. Project Pangea deliberately integrates with Swift's ISO 20022 standard rather than replacing it — a co-existence strategy that reduces adoption friction for participating banks.
Ripple received preliminary MiCA approval from Luxembourg's financial regulator on June 23, 2026, the same day as the Pangea announcement. Ripple's stablecoin payment systems target a similar European institutional market, though Ripple's focus is broader than a single trade corridor.
The distinction for Project Pangea is specificity. It targets one corridor (EUR/KRW), one settlement type (atomic PvP), and one integration pathway (Swift-compatible middleware). This narrow scope may accelerate time-to-production compared to broader platforms.
Project Pangea is an institutional bet that blockchain-based atomic settlement can solve a problem the existing FX infrastructure has not: real-time, risk-free currency exchange for corridors outside CLS coverage. The EUR/KRW corridor is the test case.
The economic logic is direct. Banks currently absorb counterparty risk for 48 hours on every trade, pay intermediary conversion costs through USD bridging, and operate within settlement windows that do not align with Asian time zones. Atomic PvP on a neutral L1 chain, connected to legacy systems via CCIP and Swift, addresses each of these friction points.
Whether 47 banks can coordinate stablecoin issuance, regulatory approval across two jurisdictions, and production-grade settlement within 12 months is an open question. The Qivalis euro stablecoin still requires DNB authorization. The won-pegged stablecoin's regulatory pathway in Seoul remains undefined. And the Pangea L1 chain itself must prove settlement finality guarantees at institutional scale.
What is not in question is the size of the addressable problem. The global FX market moves $9.6 trillion daily, and the majority of those trades still settle the way they did before the internet existed. Project Pangea is a narrow, corridor-specific attempt to change that — starting with 47 banks, two currencies, and one blockchain.