Two currencies that are not the US dollar rarely trade against each other directly. A Korean bank buying euros usually sells won for dollars first, then buys euros with those dollars, because the deepest market sits against the dollar and the direct euro-won book is thin. That detour pays a spread on each leg and parks the trade in a dollar position it never actually wanted.
Project Pangea is a bank task force betting that regulated euro and won stablecoins can take the dollar out of that middle step.
In this edition, we look at why the dollar sits between the pair, what existing bank infrastructure already fixes, and what Pangea has to prove.
Europe and South Korea move more than $150B in goods and services a year, which ranks the euro-won corridor among the world’s 15 largest trade routes, yet almost none of it changes hands as a direct euro-to-won trade. The reason is liquidity.
The global FX market turns over about $9.6T a day per the BIS 2025 Triennial Survey, and the deepest two-sided books sit against the dollar, so a bank pricing euro-won usually builds it from euro-dollar and then dollar-won. Each leg pays a spread to whoever makes the dollar market, and the dollar balance held in between is a step the trade does not need.
Project Pangea is a task force trying to remove that step. Launched on 23 June 2026 in Zurich, Chainlink pairs with two banking groups: Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium of 37 European banks, and UniKA, a Korean alliance led by Shinhan Bank, JB Bank, Kbank, FairSquareLab, and OBDIA, with more than 10 additional Korean commercial banks.
Chainlink@chainlink
NEW: Chainlink & multinational banking consortia launch Project Pangea to develop a novel solution redefining international FX markets. Pangea brings together 50+ banks, representing $10+ trillion AUM, to unlock T+0 cross-border settlement via Chainlink & ISO 20022 standards 🧵
3:54 PM · Jun 23, 2026 · 8.61M Views
114 Replies · 299 Reposts · 1.45K Likes
Across both legs the group counts 50+ banks across 16 countries and over $10T in assets, and it runs no live network yet, only a target of real transactions within roughly 12 months. Both sides of the actual euro-won pair already sit inside the consortium, which is what gives it the footprint to test real flow instead of a demo.
A finance desk will object that the settlement risk is already handled, and for these two currencies it mostly is. CLS is a bank-owned utility that settles FX on a payment-versus-payment (PvP) basis where both currency legs move together or neither does. It covers 18 currencies including the euro and the won and clears over $7T a day.
What CLS does not do is make the trade fast or direct. It runs one settlement cycle a day inside a five-hour window, with most instructions still settling two days after the trade and same-day volume a very small share. Access flows through about 70 direct members, so most Korean commercial banks reach it secondhand, and the BIS has flagged that PvP coverage is slipping behind FX growth because it concentrates in advanced-economy currencies.
Chainlink@chainlink
Existing FX market systems face severe bottlenecks due to delayed T+2 settlement cycles and fragmented market structures. To address this challenge head on, Project Pangea is bringing together dozens of global financial institutions from across Europe and South Korea.
3:54 PM · Jun 23, 2026 · 6.06K Views
1 Reply · 8 Reposts · 156 Likes
The gaps Pangea aims at are the two-day wait, the membership gate, and the dollar still sitting in the execution leg.
Pangea issues each currency as a regulated stablecoin, a token holding its value against the underlying euro or won, so a euro-won trade becomes one onchain swap that settles the same day instead of two correspondent-bank payments clearing over two. A direct euro-won market still needs deep liquidity and a real price. FairSquareLab, the Korean firm building the engine, runs a multi-currency pool with per-asset depletion barriers that stop one currency from draining while the other piles up.
Most onchain pools price off a bonding curve, the formula that moves the rate as the pool’s balance shifts, so a large trade pushes the price against the trader and invites arbitrage. Pangea’s pool instead quotes off a Chainlink FX oracle, and the protocol writes that oracle update ahead of every other transaction in the block so banks trade the live rate. Banks send the same Swift messages in ISO 20022 they already run, and Chainlink’s Runtime Environment translates them into settlement while CCIP moves euro stablecoins to the won chain. They reach the system through messages they already send, not a network they have to join.
Putting cross-border FX onto blockchain rails is a crowded graveyard. Ripple spent a decade on On-Demand Liquidity corridors, Stellar built an anchor network, and central banks ran BIS Project Meridian FX to synchronize PvP across systems using central bank money, while most commercial pilots never left the sandbox. The blockers were mostly liquidity, stablecoin regulation in both jurisdictions, and getting banks on both legs of a real pair to route live volume. Ripple and Stellar also asked banks to hold a new bridge asset, XRP or XLM, in place of the dollar, which is a swap most treasury desks decline.
Pangea’s avoids all that by settling in a stablecoin backed by your own currency, send the Swift message you already send, and let Chainlink sit as the technology layer rather than a network you adopt.
Asia clears about 60% of global stablecoin payments, so Korea is a good market to enter, and Chainlink brings prior institutional plumbing, having settled tokenized US Treasuries with JP Morgan’s Kinexys and Ondo.
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