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 see the project as a challenge to Ripple’s decades-long push for 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 are very much a technology provider. It’s less about creating a unified network from scratch. It’s about applying the technology, finding out where the value is and growing the network organically.”
Ultimately, the goal is to free up trapped capital and modernize international trade corridors.
“If I send you money and it’s lost in transit for a while, you don’t receive it and that money can’t be used,” Ariyasinghe said. “It has to be a good thing to reduce that time as much as possible so that customers can access the money as quickly as possible.”
By reducing settlement times from days to near real-time, the participating institutions hope to lower liquidity costs, reduce settlement risk and give companies faster access to funds tied up in cross-border transactions.
