Quant and CBDCs: what the company actually built

What a CBDC is, and the retail versus wholesale split

A central bank digital currency is a digital form of a country's fiat money that is a direct liability of the central bank. That single word, liability, is the whole distinction. The pounds in your current account are a claim on a commercial bank; a stablecoin is a claim on a private issuer; a digital pound would be a claim on the Bank of England itself, just as a banknote is. The Bank of International Settlements describes CBDC in exactly these terms in its Rosalind press release.

Central banks talk about two families. A retail CBDC is for the public: households and shops, phone wallets, cards, perhaps offline payments. A wholesale CBDC is for banks and financial institutions, settling large transactions between themselves, often across borders. Project mBridge is a wholesale design; the digital pound, the digital euro, e-CNY and the digital lira are retail designs.

Most retail designs are "two-tier". The central bank issues the currency and runs the core ledger; private firms such as banks and fintechs build the wallets and user-facing services on top. Project Rosalind was explicitly built on that model, and it matters for understanding Quant: the company has never positioned itself as the issuer or the ledger. It positions itself as the API layer that sits between the core ledger and the applications. If you are new to the technology, the Overledger explainer covers how that gateway works.

Why central banks are exploring digital currencies

The motives differ by country, and the honest answer is that several central banks are still deciding whether the idea is worth it at all. The recurring arguments are these. Cash use is falling, and a central bank that issues no digital form of its money risks the public using only private money. Payments infrastructure is ageing and expensive, and a modern core ledger with open APIs could let new firms compete with incumbents. Programmability could let money carry conditions, releasing a payment only when goods arrive, for instance. And cross-border payments remain slow and costly, which is where wholesale and multi-CBDC projects such as mBridge come in.

The counter-arguments are just as loud. Commercial banks worry about deposits leaving their balance sheets. Privacy advocates worry about a state ledger of every purchase. And in October 2026 the Bank of England's deputy governor Sarah Breeden said, per press summaries, that the Bank is in no rush to launch a retail digital pound because tokenised deposits and sterling stablecoins might deliver similar benefits. That remark is the most important context for everything below: the frontier has quietly shifted from CBDC to tokenised commercial-bank money, and that shift happens to favour what Quant sells.

Quant's actual role in CBDC projects

Three engagements are confirmed by counterparties or primary sources. Each is narrower than the community version, so it is worth being precise.

Project Rosalind (BIS Innovation Hub London and Bank of England)

Rosalind ran from 2022 to June 2023 under the BIS Innovation Hub's London centre together with the Bank of England. It built and tested an API layer for a retail CBDC: 33 API functionalities and more than 30 use cases, from person-to-person transfers and in-store payments to NFC, QR codes, smartcards, biometrics and micropayments. The BIS is blunt that the project "is purely experimental and does not reflect any intentions by the Bank of England on CBDC policy, design or launch".

The BIS pages name no vendor. Quant's role is known from the vendors' own releases: on 16 June 2023 Quant said it was part of the vendor team supplying the underlying infrastructure, smart contracts and ledger interoperability, and on 27 June 2023 UST said it was the "innovation vendor" that built the front-end Rosalind API layer. The accurate sentence is therefore: Quant supplied infrastructure to a vendor team on a completed BIS and Bank of England experiment. The inaccurate sentence, which you will see on social media, is that Quant is building the digital pound.

UK Regulated Liability Network (UK Finance, with R3)

In April 2024 UK Finance, working with EY, selected R3 and Quant as technology providers for the RLN experimentation phase. R3 supplied the Corda-based ledger; Quant supplied the orchestration and API layer via Overledger, focused on connectivity to participants' existing systems and on payments programmability. Participants included Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, Standard Chartered, Virgin Money, Mastercard and Visa. UK Finance published the experimentation-phase report in September 2024. The RLN was a concept for a shared ledger of regulated money, both tokenised deposits and potentially CBDC, so it sits at the boundary between the two topics.

ECB digital euro innovation platform

On 5 May 2025 the ECB announced a digital euro innovation platform with almost 70 market participants, chosen from over 100 applications. "Pioneers" test conditional payments against ECB technical specifications and an API; "visionaries" research societal use cases. The ECB release names nobody; the participant annex lists "Quant Network Europe Limited" in the pioneer workstream. That is a real, documented role, and it is also a sandbox role shared with dozens of other firms. The ECB ran separate procurement for digital euro components, and Quant was not selected as a component provider. Nor is there evidence that Quant took part in the earlier 2022 to 2023 ECB prototyping exercise.

Tokenised deposits: where the real traction is

If CBDC is the headline, tokenised deposits are the business. A tokenised deposit is an ordinary commercial-bank deposit represented on a shared ledger, so it can move between banks and settle instantly, carry conditions, and plug into digital-asset markets, while remaining a bank liability covered by existing regulation. Banks like it because the money stays on their balance sheet; central banks like it because it needs no new form of public money.

Two programmes with primary-source evidence put Quant at the centre of this. In September 2025 UK Finance selected Quant to build the platform for the Great British Tokenised Deposit pilot with Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander; Monzo joined in January 2026. The use cases were online-marketplace payments, remortgaging and digital-asset settlement. In late September 2026 UK Finance announced the first live customer transactions, including two remortgage completions where funds were locked and automatically released. That is not a proof of concept; it is customer money moving on a platform Quant built.

Then, on 24 September 2026, The Clearing House in the United States, operator of the RTP and CHIPS payment systems, selected Quant to provide the "interoperability, orchestration, and transaction-management layer" for its On-Chain Money Initiative, an interbank network for clearing and settling tokenised deposits. TCH expects it to be available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027. The history page records what that announcement did to the price in the following days, and it was not calm.

Add the March 2026 Murex integration, which embeds Overledger and Quant Flow into the MX.3 platform for tokenised deposits and digital bonds, and the January 2026 go-to-market partnership with Dentsu Soken for tokenised deposits in Japan, and a pattern emerges: Quant's commercial momentum is in bank-issued digital money, not in central-bank money.

Programmable payments, in plain terms

"Programmable" sounds abstract until you see the remortgage case. A borrower switches lender; the new lender's funds need to reach the old lender only once the legal completion happens. On the GBTD platform the funds were locked and then auto-released when the condition was met, removing a manual reconciliation step that today involves solicitors, CHAPS payments and a day of waiting. The same logic applies to marketplace purchases that release on delivery, or to a digital bond that pays out automatically.

Quant's tooling for this is Quant Flow, announced in May 2025, with a payments language called PayScript whose specification is public on GitHub. The ECB pioneer workstream is also specifically about conditional payments. Programmability is the thread that connects Quant's CBDC experiments with its tokenised-deposit deployments; the ecosystem page describes the product line in detail, and the interoperability page explains why orchestration across several ledgers is harder than it sounds.

The privacy debate

Every retail CBDC consultation has run into the same objection: a central bank ledger of consumer payments is a surveillance risk, and programmable money could become controlled money. The Bank of England's digital pound documents stress that the Bank would not see personal data and that any digital pound would require primary legislation and further consultation. The ECB's design pairs an online rail with an offline, cash-like option. China's e-CNY, by contrast, is already live at national scale, with interest paid on balances from January 2026 and more than twenty operating institutions (reported counts range from 22 to 30 depending on the source), and critics point to it as the model that Western designs must avoid.

For Quant the debate is a commercial fact more than a technical one. Rosalind's two-tier model and the privacy-by-design language in Quant's own bank products exist because no Western central bank will adopt a system that cannot satisfy the objection. The Breeden remarks in October 2026 suggest the UK may sidestep the fight altogether by leaning on tokenised deposits, which already live inside regulated banks with existing privacy law.

What all this means for QNT

Here is the misconception to correct first: no CBDC runs on QNT, and no bank in these projects is known to hold QNT. The GBTD settlement is in tokenised sterling deposits; the TCH network settles tokenised dollar deposits; Rosalind settled nothing real at all. Neither UK Finance, The Clearing House nor Quant has stated that banks must buy or hold the token, and Quant's own FAQ says platform fees can be paid in US dollars or by subscribing with QNT.

The real link between CBDC work and the token is indirect. QNT is used to pay for Overledger licences, and since December 2021 licence fees for live-platform customers have been payable in QNT. More enterprise deployments should mean more licence demand, and Quant has at times described licence QNT as locked for the licence term, though its current site does not state a lock period. The problem for an investor is that Quant does not publish licence revenue, throughput or how much QNT is converted on customers' behalf. You are inferring demand from press releases. The tokenomics page walks through the fixed 14.6 million supply and the licence mechanism, and the price scenarios page shows what different adoption assumptions imply.

Two further points for balance. First, the market has repeatedly treated CBDC and bank news as validation: QNT roughly doubled on the TCH announcement in late September 2026 and gave most of it back within days, which is volatility, not fundamentals. Second, the newer Fusion rollup, live since June 2026, does use QNT for gas and node staking, so the token's utility story is broadening beyond licences; that is separate from CBDC work and covered on the staking page.

Status of major CBDC projects

The table summarises official status as of our last research pass. Links go to the responsible institution where one exists; mBridge details are taken from the BIS project page rather than our own research files, so verify there.