Author: Jae, PANews
Quant Network (QNT), which had been trading sideways below $100 for nearly a year, has become one of the most talked-about黑马 in the crypto market over the past five days.
On September 24, driven by the announcement from The Clearing House (TCH), the U.S. clearinghouse, that Quant was providing the underlying technology architecture for its On-Chain Money Initiative, QNT surged sharply, achieving a cumulative gain of approximately 300% over seven days.
TCH is jointly owned by 25 of the United States' top commercial banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Its RTP real-time payment network and CHIPS large-value clearing system handle massive interbank settlement transactions, processing over $2 trillion in interbank clearing volume daily.
This means that Quant has secured not just a business order, but also a gateway into the banking infrastructure.
Avoiding the consumer route, Quant focuses on enterprise-level on-chain infrastructure for traditional finance.
From its inception, Quant has pursued a B2B business path: targeting banks, regulated institutions, and large enterprises to build enterprise-grade interoperability infrastructure that connects traditional financial systems with heterogeneous distributed ledgers.
Its technological origins trace back to 2015, when various consortium and private blockchains emerged, but their ledgers remained isolated, and there was no reliable translation and orchestration layer between traditional financial systems and distributed ledgers, creating significant barriers to value exchange across systems.
By the end of 2017, Quant officially established its flagship product, Overledger: a cross-ledger operating system independent of underlying consensus mechanisms, which does not alter the native logic of individual blockchains but instead acts as an orchestration layer to enable the transfer of information, messages, and assets across systems.
The team’s background is also a key differentiator for Quant compared to most crypto projects. The management team primarily comes from traditional payments, cybersecurity, and large multinational institutions:
Founder and CEO Gilbert Verdian, formerly Chief Information Security Officer at Vocalink, a Mastercard company, and a member of the UK Treasury, the Federal Reserve’s Payment Security Working Group, and relevant committees at the Bank of England, has actively participated in the development of ISO blockchain standards;
CPO Martin Hargreaves, also from Vocalink, holds patents for ACH automated clearing and is involved with the Digital Pound Foundation;
CTO, COO, and board members with backgrounds in industrial-grade systems, international consulting, Wall Street wealth management, and large-scale government and enterprise security.
In 2018, Quant launched a token sale raising approximately $26 million. During its business expansion phase, Quant secured a strategic investment from the renowned European venture capital firm Alpha Sigma Capital, and subsequently partnered with FinTech advisory firm Alchemmy and the UK government-backed technology innovation network Tech Nation, deeply integrating its capital structure with European local tech incubators and enterprise-level advisory networks.
Before partnering with TCH, it had already participated in numerous projects, including the UK’s RLN regulated liability tokenization initiative, the European Central Bank’s digital euro prototype validation, Oracle, SIA’s European banking network, and Murex’s capital markets system, establishing a presence among central banks, commercial banks, and major financial software firms across Europe and the U.S. TCH’s collaboration represents a key breakthrough into the U.S. clearing hub, built upon years of institutional experience.
TCH partners with Quant to build a settlement layer for bank tokenized deposits.
On September 24, TCH officially announced its partnership with Quant. In fact, preparations had already begun earlier this year.
On June 5, TCH spearheaded the On-Chain Money Initiative and received broad support from the majority of its shareholder banks, encompassing nearly all major U.S. commercial banks. TCH aims to build a shared clearing layer across institutions, enabling atomic, real-time transfers of tokenized deposits within a regulated financial network.
TCH's key requirements align perfectly with Quant's core capabilities.
In TCH’s design, Quant serves as the technical foundation, handling interoperability, transaction orchestration, and transaction management for the on-chain currency network, as well as integrating with existing fiat payment rails such as RTP and CHIPS.
Gilbert Verdian, founder and CEO of Quant, elevated the significance of the partnership: TCH is at the heart of the U.S. banking system, and this collaboration will set standards for global banking.
In the past, the application of blockchain technology in interbank clearing and settlement was consistently hindered by two major bottlenecks: each bank’s underlying chain architecture operated in isolation, making interoperability inherently difficult; and the on-chain ledger environment lacked native connectivity with the central bank-centered fiat payment system, resulting in poor interoperability.
Quant now offers a new solution: using the Overledger enterprise operating system as a universal orchestration engine across heterogeneous ledgers and banking systems.
In the business process, when a customer holding tokenized deposits issued by a commercial bank issues a payment instruction, Overledger acts as an intermediary, orchestrating multiple systems and converting messages. The value of this solution lies in its “non-intrusive design”: participating banks can integrate tokenized deposits into a new on-chain clearing network without dismantling their existing compliance and risk infrastructure or rebuilding their operating systems.
Quant's role is in interbank clearing and settlement, with the ultimate focus being "tokenized deposits."
The essence of tokenized deposits is commercial bank deposits, but physical deposits or cross-border payments cannot be transferred or settled in real time outside of banking hours. In contrast, stablecoins are typically backed and managed by specific issuing entities, operate independently of the banking deposit system, and enable real-time transfers.
For banks, tokenized deposits can be transferred in a digital, programmable format, eliminating the threat of private stablecoins diverting deposits and upgrading batch clearing, previously limited by business hours, to 24/7 automated fund transfers triggered by smart contract conditions.
QNT repricing, value capture logic yet to be validated
Independent analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs enthusiastically endorsed QNT on social media, recommending that every investor buy at least one QNT—just as he previously advised buying at least one BTC in 2013, a recommendation the market has since rewarded with an optimistic valuation.
But take a step back—TCH’s partnership is only the beginning. This round of QNT’s price movement reflects the market’s revaluation of Quant’s potential role within traditional finance; however, a crucial gap still remains between commercialization and the transmission of token value.
At the tokenomics level, the Quant whitepaper stipulates that institutions accessing the Overledger gateway and utilizing cross-ledger interoperability services must pay licensing fees and API settlement costs. Given that the QNT supply is nearly fully circulated and has a fixed hard cap, even minimal demand from trillions of dollars in traditional capital could lead to passive locking of circulating supply through institutional adoption, generating a scarcity premium.
On the flip side, there is the value transmission gap that the market most often overlooks.
Quant allows customers to pay platform fees in USD or QNT, meaning customers are not required to continuously purchase QNT to use the service.
"Quant securing a large order" does not equate to "significant growth in demand for QNT." TCH is purchasing "Quant's software infrastructure services," not making large-scale purchases of QNT on the secondary market. The official statement has not disclosed important details such as contract value, revenue scale, or holding requirements.
From the implementation timeline, the TCH tokenized deposit network is not expected to open for pilot access until the first half of 2027 and is currently still in development. With several quarters remaining until the network’s launch, QNT’s current price reflects primarily commercial expectations rather than actual network revenue.
From a competitive standpoint, the bank tokenization infrastructure space is already crowded with players: JPMorgan’s proprietary Kinexys and Canton Network are strong competitors. TCH’s choice has given Quant a first-mover advantage, but far from an exclusive victory.
The collaboration between TCH and Quant marks a deepening of traditional finance's exploration of blockchain, moving beyond superficial asset tokenization to systemic infrastructure upgrades of commercial bank deposit systems and 24/7 clearing and settlement networks.
In the past, tokenization discussions in the market mostly focused on asset-level innovations. This time, the transformation is happening at the settlement infrastructure level: financial systems such as interbank deposits, institutional settlements, and payment system interfaces are beginning to be reimagined through programmable approaches.
Quant secured a highly valuable entry ticket, but within its 300% price surge, expectations far outweighed actual performance. From technology adoption to revenue realization and finally token value capture, each step is a long journey.
The blockchain era of banking infrastructure is about to begin. After the hype, only those who can deliver real-world applications will stand firm.