Project Pangea 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 payment infrastructure.
Not a Ripple rival
Some industry observers may view the project as a challenge to Ripple’s decade-long push into institutional cross-border settlement, but Chainlink insists its approach is collaborative rather than disruptive.
“I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a rival,” Ariyasinghe noted. “We’re very much a technology provider. It’s less about creating a unified network from scratch. It’s about applying the technology, finding where that value is, and growing the network organically.”
Ultimately, the goal is to free up trapped capital and modernize international trade corridors.
“If I’m sending money to you and it’s lost in transit for quite some time, you don’t receive it, and that money isn’t able to be used,” Ariyasinghe said. “To reduce that time as much as possible, for customers to access that money absolutely as fast as possible, has to be a good thing.”
By reducing settlement times from days to near real time, participating institutions hope to lower liquidity costs, reduce settlement risk and give businesses faster access to funds tied up in cross-border transactions.