“This is not just a simple show of conscience,” Ariyasinghe said. “Everyone is coming in with their eyes wide open. The appetite is all about building real infrastructure… The goal is to conduct live transactions within a framework of legal and regulatory compliance over the next 12 months.”
A $150 billion trade corridor
The initiative focuses on the trade corridor between Europe and South Korea, an economic artery that processes more than $150 billion in goods and services each year, making it one of the 15 largest trade routes in the world. It also leverages regional trends: industry data shows that 60% of all global stablecoin payments take place in Asia.
“I completely agree with this statistic,” Ariyasinghe said. “This gives people a good indication of where the real demand is. In less developed financial ecosystems, demand is increasing, but the infrastructure is not necessarily in place. These forms of token money fill a real need.”
Rather than forcing traditional financial institutions to overhaul their IT systems or buy cryptocurrencies, the Pangea Project intends to act as a middleware translator. Banks will trigger transactions using Swift, the global messaging network they have used since the 1970s, and Chainlink’s infrastructure will translate these orders into instant “atomic swaps” on a neutral, independent ledger called the Pangea L1 network.
The Pangea project is designed to work with existing Swift and ISO 20022 banking standards, allowing traditional financial institutions to connect to blockchain-based settlement rails without replacing their payments infrastructure.
