Chainlink headlines Project Pangea as all-star bank group eyes $150B trade rout

Chainlink has announced the launch of Project Pangea, a cross-border foreign exchange settlement initiative backed by 47 South Korean and European banks representing over $10 trillion in combined assets. 

Project Pangea pairs Chainlink with Qivalis and UniKA, two banking groups made up of 37 European banks and more than 10 South Korean banks, respectively. 

What is Project Pangea? 

Project Pangea aims to speed up foreign exchange settlement. Right now, these trades usually take 48 hours to clear, referred to as a T+2 settlement. Project Pangea wants to cut that to near-instant settlement, or T+0. It would do this using regulated stablecoins tied to the euro and the South Korean won. 

The project connects Chainlink with two banking groups. The first is Qivalis, a euro stablecoin group made up of 37 European banks. 

The second is UniKA, an alliance of more than 10 South Korean commercial banks. The project focuses on the Europe-South Korea trade corridor that handles over $150 billion in goods and services each year. It ranks among the world’s 15 largest trade routes.

The technology behind Project Pangea’s fast settlement is called atomic payment-versus-payment settlement. In simple terms, both sides of a currency trade clear at the exact same time. If one side fails, neither side goes through, removing the risk that one party might not pay after the other side has already sent its money.

European banks would still start their transactions through Swift, which banks have used since the 1970s, and then Chainlink’s technology would turn those messages into on-chain atomic swaps that run on a separate ledger called the Pangea L1 Network. 

Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink’s vice president for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, said the group wants to start live transactions within the next 12 months. 

LINK price has not followed institutional Chainlink momentum

In May, Cryptopolitan reported that DTCC chose Chainlink’s Runtime Environment for its Collateral AppChain, a blockchain-based platform that handles collateral pricing, margining, and settlement automatically around the clock. 

DTCC processed about $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2025. 

Earlier this year, Cryptopolitan also reported that Robinhood picked Chainlink as its oracle provider for Robinhood Chain, its Ethereum Layer 2 network built on Arbitrum. In the first quarter of 2026, Amundi and Spiko used Chainlink’s technology to launch a tokenized mutual fund that gathered over $400 million in assets within three weeks. 

There are more partnerships, too. In December 2025, Chainlink worked with 24 financial institutions, including DTCC, Swift, Euroclear, UBS, and BNP Paribas. They built infrastructure for corporate actions processing that typically costs the industry about $58 billion each year.

In the first quarter of 2026, the U.S. SEC and CFTC jointly said LINK is a digital commodity. In April 2026, Chainlink launched on the AWS Marketplace, giving millions of developers access to its data feeds, data streams, and proof-of-reserve tools. 

However, despite all these partnerships, LINK has stayed between $8 and $10 for most of 2026. In late April, the token traded at about $9.23. That was up 9.5% over 30 days. But it was down 36.6% compared to one year earlier. That puts LINK about 82% below its all-time high of $52.70 from May 2021.

Spot ETF inflows for LINK rose from $10.82 million in March to $11.08 million in April. This was the first monthly increase since December, which saw a peak of $59.16 million. 

There is a clear gap between how much Chainlink’s technology is being used and how its token price is moving. Cryptopolitan reported that Chainlink has handled over $28 trillion in total transaction volume. Its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol moves about $90 million in tokens each week, and tokenized real-world assets built on Chainlink reached $27 billion in 2026.