Blockchain infrastructure company Chainlink said it is joining a group of banks collectively representing more than $10 trillion in assets under management to enable real-time, stablecoin-based cross-border payments for currency transactions within a year.
The coalition, called Project Pangea, aims to redefine global currency markets, Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink’s vice president for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, said in a video interview on Tuesday. In addition to Chainlink, the group consists of Qivalis, a euro-stablecoin consortium backed by 37 European banks, and UniKA, a Korean banking alliance representing more than ten commercial banks.
The project aims to explore the shift of currency settlement from a traditional 48-hour (T+2) timeline to near-instantaneous (T+0) settlement using regulated Euro and South Korean won-pegged stablecoins, or crypto tokens whose value is pegged 1:1 to the underlying currency.
The initiative will evaluate whether the stablecoins can be exchanged via atomic pay-versus-pay (PvP) settlement, where both sides of a currency trade settle simultaneously or not at all, reducing counterparty and settlement risk.
The project goes beyond an engineering experiment, Ariyasinghe said. Chainlink draws a line in the sand between theoretical proofs-of-concept and actual infrastructure.