Quant has successively secured projects with banks in the US and UK, driving QNT up five times in four days through institutional narratives.

By: angelilu, Foresight News

On the morning of September 28, the price of QNT surged to 372.89 USDT within a few hours, but at the time of writing, the price has dropped to 268.15 USDT, with a 24-hour increase of 54.38%. However, this dramatic fluctuation has brought a long-dormant project back to the center of the market. Just over a week ago, it was hovering around 60 US dollars.

A few days ago, on September 24, Quant announced that it was selected by The Clearing House in the US to provide technology for its On-Chain Money Initiative. The latter operates core payment networks in the US such as RTP and CHIPS, clearing and settling over 20 trillion US dollars each business day. Quant will be responsible for interoperability and transaction orchestration, allowing tokenized deposits to be cleared on-chain while connecting to existing fiat payment systems.

Meanwhile, the UK has already applied this technology to real customers' pound deposits. Seven banks, including Barclays and HSBC UK, along with construction mutual aid organizations collectively tested a "programmable deposit" platform: customers do not need to exchange stablecoins, and the pounds originally held in banks can be locked first, with automatic payment occurring once the property transaction is completed or goods are delivered. On September 24, the platform announced that the first three real transactions had been completed. This platform is called GBTD, and it is Quant that connects the systems of various banks. On September 24, after the two major announcements, QNT saw a daily increase of 27.86%, reaching a high of 91.35 USDT.

Until September 27, gold analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs unearthed an old post from 2013 suggesting to buy 1 BTC, and 13 years later, he swapped BTC for QNT, stating, "Today I suggest everyone buy at least 1 QNT, the risk is a loss of 120 US dollars, and the potential gain is 10,000 US dollars." After the post was made, QNT surged from about 120 US dollars to a peak of 370 US dollars. Social transmission amplified the already heating market.

The news from The Clearing House provides imaginative space, the UK case provides practical proof, and Jan's post brings the story outside the industry circle. The overlap of the three with the price increase doesn’t necessarily mean that the stage increase of over 300% comes solely from fundamentals; low liquidity, chase trading, and leverage can also magnify the market.

What is truly worth questioning is why the market is willing to reprice Quant at this time.

Quant: Connecting Banks, Payment Networks, and Different Blockchains

Quant itself is not a public blockchain but a fintech company responsible for connecting banks, payment networks, and different blockchains. It aims to address the issue of systemic fragmentation in tokenized finance.

In the process of banks promoting the tokenization of deposits and financial assets, banks use core banking systems internally, while interbank transfers rely on RTGS, Faster Payments, RTP, or CHIPS, and digital assets may exist on Corda, Ethereum, or the banks' own permissioned chains. These systems record assets and funds respectively but find it difficult to understand each other's states. Thus, a digital bond transaction may need to pass through multiple interfaces, custodians, and manual reconciliation steps, with the assets already delivered while cash still waits for confirmation in another system.

To address the fragmented systems, Quant provides a suite of tools for banks: Overledger connects banking systems with blockchains; Quant Flow runs automated payment processes; PayScript is responsible for setting payment conditions; QuantNet coordinates inter-institutional settlements; Quant Fusion processes transactions from multiple blockchains in the same environment and currently connects 74 networks.

It does not require banks to abandon their original ledgers, nor does it require all participants to migrate to the same chain. Banks continue to hold customer, deposit, and compliance data, while Quant ensures that instructions cross different systems, with funds locking, condition verification, and asset delivery occurring according to the same process.

If each bank has its own railway and station, Quant aims to sell a signaling and scheduling system that operates across the railways.

This positioning is related to the team's background:

• Quant's founder and CEO, Gilbert Verdian, has over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, having worked in the UK Prime Minister's Office, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and the Ministry of Justice, as well as with Mastercard, Vocalink, and HSBC; in 2015, he initiated the ISO blockchain standard TC307 and was responsible for its interoperability working group.
• Its Chief Product Officer, Martin Hargreaves, worked at Vocalink for nearly 13 years, holding patents in payment data processing and ACH transactions;
• Quant's director, David Yates, previously served as CEO of Vocalink and president of Mastercard New Payment Platforms.

This core team is distinctly biased towards payment infrastructure rather than a typical crypto-native startup team.

Why Quant Bets on Tokenized Deposits

Led by the UK Finance Association, the GBTD project for tokenized pound deposits and a personal goods transaction. In property transactions, customer deposits are locked first and automatically released once conditions are fulfilled. Funds remain in the customer's account during the waiting period and can continue to earn interest. In personal transactions, the buyer's funds are only transferred to the seller after the goods are delivered.

Throughout the process, no one exchanges pounds for stablecoins. What is being programmed is still commercial bank deposits.

This is precisely the most important difference between tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Stablecoins are typically liabilities of the issuing institution, their value maintained by reserve assets and redemption mechanisms; tokenized deposits remain liabilities of banks to customers, preserving existing regulations, deposit protection, and bank account relationships while simply adding locking, additional conditions, and real-time settlement capabilities. CBDCs, on the other hand, are liabilities of central banks, with a different legal relationship.

For banks, this is a defensive battle. If on-chain payments are ultimately dominated by stablecoins, banks may lose low-cost deposits, customer access, and payment data. Tokenized deposits allow banks to absorb the programmability of blockchain while keeping currency issuance and customer relationships on their own balance sheets.

What Quant bets on is not a specific digital currency but a future where commercial bank deposits, stablecoins, CBDCs, and tokenized securities coexist. The more forms there are, the more important the infrastructure to connect and orchestrate them becomes.

From UK Banking Projects to US Clearing Networks

Quant's entry into the UK banking system dates back to 2022 when it participated in Project Rosalind, developed by the Bank for International Settlements' Innovation Hub and the Bank of England, to develop an API layer for retail CBDC experimentation. The project ultimately formed 33 interfaces and tested over 30 payment scenarios.

In 2024, UK Finance selected R3 and Quant to build a prototype for the Regulated Liability Network experiment. R3 provides a shared ledger based on Corda, while Quant provides APIs, programmable payments, and orchestration layers. GBTD has followed this route but has swapped simulated funds for real customer deposits.

The upcoming UK experiment will enter the capital market. Participating banks plan to issue tradeable and settleable digital debt instruments, paying interest with tokenized deposits, and testing synchronized settlement between cash, digital assets, and central bank reserves. GBTD has also entered the Bank of England's Synchronisation Lab to explore how to connect tokenized bonds with the central bank's RTGS system.

Participants of the UK GBTD project

The scale of the US project is larger, but it is still in the construction phase. The Clearing House’s network plans to open to participating institutions in the first half of 2027, with application scenarios including corporate fund management, liquidity scheduling, cross-border payments, and digital asset settlements. It is held by 25 large financial institutions in the US, but this does not mean that all 25 shareholder banks have committed to using Quant. The first participants, real transaction volume, and charging models are what need verification in the next phase.

Quant is also collaborating with Murex to integrate tokenized deposits and digital bond settlements into the MX.3 system and is participating in the European Central Bank's digital euro innovation platform. Its focus has shifted from connecting blockchains to connecting bank deposits, central bank currencies, securities, and traditional payment networks.

Technology Company or Bank Currency Infrastructure Operator?

QNT is an ERC-20 token issued on Ethereum; it entered the market through a token sale in 2018, destroying some unsold tokens in September of the same year. The latest MiCA disclosure document shows that its maximum supply is fixed at 14,881,364 tokens, and as of September 28, according to Bitget, the FDV of QNT is about 3.975 billion US dollars.

It is defined as a functional token used to access Overledger services, platform licenses, developer access, and internal certification and authorization within the ecosystem. Historically, in June 2021, QNT was listed on Coinbase Pro, driving its increase; in September, the Overledger 2.0 upgrade occurred, with QNT reaching an all-time high of about 427 US dollars on September 11, while during the bear market of 2022, it dropped to about 40 US dollars, after which it experienced a sharp rise unrelated to the market.

This round of increases easily reminds people of 2021: new products, big institutions, and a supply of less than 15 million tokens have once again pushed QNT into a reevaluation trend. But for holders, there is still a missing breakdown between institutional adoption and token demand. Quant has not disclosed the number of enterprise customers, bank transaction volumes, and licensing revenue, nor clarified how much QNT is needed to purchase or lock for these businesses. The adoption of Quant's technology by banks does not imply that every transaction will purchase QNT from the secondary market.

What is truly worth watching next is not how many more banks can be added to the partnership list, but whether QNT has entered the actual settlement and payment processes of these businesses. The purchase of software services by banks and the ongoing buying and locking of a token are not far apart in headlines but are two separate matters in terms of valuation.

The digital bond experiments of GBTD, the synchronization settlement outcomes of the Bank of England, and The Clearing House's on-chain currency network planned to be opened in the first half of 2027 are all verifiable milestones.