JAKARTA - Chainlink, FairSquareLab, UniKA and Qivalis announced Project Pangea on June 23 to test faster cross-border foreign-exchange settlement between South Korean and European banking groups.

The project brings together UniKA, the Korean coalition behind Project Pangea, and Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks. UniKA’s steering committee includes Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, Kbank, FairSquareLab and OBDIA, with more than 10 participating Korean commercial banks.

The test focuses on the bank settlement layer that sits behind cross-border currency transfers. Project Pangea is designed to move foreign-exchange settlement from the traditional T+2 cycle toward real-time T+0 settlement using compliant euro- and Korean won-referenced stablecoins.

Project Pangea will test direct atomic Payment-versus-Payment swaps of EUR and KRW stablecoins. Under that structure, both sides of a currency transaction settle together or not at all, reducing the risk that one party pays before receiving the other currency.

“For Korea, Project Pangea is more than an efficiency gain — it opens a path for the Korean won to connect more directly with global currency markets, reducing reliance on intermediary currencies,” said Joonhong Kim, chief executive of FairSquareLab.

The Bank for International Settlements said in a September 30, 2025 release that global over-the-counter foreign-exchange trading reached $9.6 trillion per day in April 2025, up 28% from $7.5 trillion three years earlier. Chainlink said cross-border transactions can still be delayed when institutions need to convert capital through intermediary currencies.

Chainlink will provide data, interoperability and orchestration infrastructure, including FX market data and cross-chain settlement tools. FairSquareLab will provide onchain FX settlement technology and the Pangea L1 network, where settlement contracts are designed to operate outside the control of any single country or participating bank.

The system is designed to work with Swift and ISO 20022 banking standards already used by financial institutions. The announcement said banks would continue using familiar payment messaging standards, with instructions translated into onchain settlement actions through Chainlink infrastructure.

The project follows a wider European bank push to build regulated euro stablecoin infrastructure. Reuters reported on May 20 that Qivalis had expanded to 37 financial institutions from 15 countries, including ING, BNP Paribas and BBVA.

ING said the Qivalis consortium plans to launch a regulated euro-denominated stablecoin in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. That approval would determine when the euro side of the settlement model can move beyond consortium testing.