Who created Quant, and how it got from a standards proposal to live bank money

Who created Quant

Quant was created by Gilbert Verdian, and unusually for a crypto project, his pre-crypto career is the most important part of the origin story. According to his official biography he spent more than twenty years in cybersecurity, holding chief information security officer, chief information officer and chief technology officer roles in both government and industry. On the government side the biography lists Downing Street, HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and NSW Health in Australia; on the private side it lists Mastercard, Vocalink, CSC, EY, PwC, BP and HSBC.

The Vocalink role matters most. Vocalink runs the UK's core payment infrastructure, including Faster Payments and Bacs, and was bought by Mastercard in 2017. A 2018 press release describes Verdian as having been responsible for the security of the UK's payment infrastructure there before leaving to work on Quant full-time. That background explains why Quant has always pitched itself to banks and payment networks rather than to retail crypto users, and why its later board includes David Yates, the former Vocalink chief executive.

The other thread is standards. In 2015 Verdian proposed to the International Organization for Standardization that it take up blockchain, which led to the creation of ISO/TC 307, the committee that now covers blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Quant says the standard has been adopted by 57 countries. Verdian describes himself as convenor of the committee's interoperability working group, a claim consistent across his ISO, WIPO and ITU presentations, although ISO's public committee page does not list convenor names. In January 2017 he was elected chair of BSI DLT/1, the UK's national blockchain committee. The standards work gave Quant its founding idea: if ledgers are going to be built to a common standard, something has to sit between them and the applications that use them.

From Remitt Ltd to Quant Network

The UK register tells a tidier story than the marketing. Company number 09798383 was incorporated on 28 September 2015 as Remitt Ltd, with Gilbert Verdian and Sassoon Grigorian as directors. Grigorian resigned on 26 May 2017 and the company changed its name to Quant Network Ltd on 2 June 2017. Its registered office is 20-22 Wenlock Road in London, and it remains active, with accounts last made up to 30 September 2025.

In October 2017 a Swiss company, Quant Network AG, was registered in Zug. It would become the issuer of the token the following spring; on 7 August 2024 it was renamed QNT Services AG. A holding company, Quant Group Corporation Ltd (formerly Quant Network Holdings Ltd), was incorporated in November 2019. There is no foundation and no DAO; the project has always run through for-profit companies, a point Quant confirmed in the token-transparency filing it made with Blockworks in July 2026. The legitimacy page walks through those records in more detail.

Overledger itself was announced on 7 December 2017 as a cross-blockchain operating system for data interoperability. The whitepaper followed in January 2018 and set out the four-layer design, transaction, messaging, filtering and ordering, application, that the Overledger page still uses to explain the gateway.

The 2018 token sale and burn

Quant raised money the way most 2018 projects did, through a token sale, but on a smaller scale than its later market value suggests. A pre-sale ran from 19 March to 1 April 2018, allocating up to 15 million QNT at 687 per ETH, a 37.5 percent bonus. The public sale ran from 2 to 30 April with 31 million QNT on offer at 430 QNT per ETH, which worked out to roughly $1.10 per token at the time, with a minimum cap of $5 million and a KYC whitelist. In the end 9,964,259 QNT were sold and about $11 million was raised. Tokens were distributed on 25 June 2018.

Most of the offer went unsold, and on 14 September 2018 Quant did something that defined the token's economics: it burned 9,545,765.95 unsold QNT. Quant's own announcement gave the post-burn figures as a total supply of 14,612,493 QNT, of which 9,964,259 were public and 4,648,234 were held by the company. There is no minting function in the contract, so that total has never changed. Third-party claims of $26 million raised across five rounds, or of a May 2018 sale, are contradicted by the business paper figures Quant later confirmed; this site uses Quant's numbers.

The all-time low came quickly afterwards: about $0.22 on 22 August 2018, according to CoinGecko, before the burn had even happened. The tokenomics page covers the post-burn allocation between public holders, the company reserve, founders and advisers.

Building Overledger

Between the token sale and the first production release, Quant spent two years on partnerships and infrastructure. In March 2019 it became an AWS Partner Network technology partner; in April it was a founding member of INATBA, the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications; in June it agreed with SIA, the Italian payments processor now part of Nexi, to connect SIAchain to Overledger, a test that was declared successful a year later across SIAchain, Corda and a private Ethereum network. Oracle took Quant into its startup ecosystem, and in 2021 certified Overledger for its cloud.

Overledger 1.0 reached a testbed in June 2020, version 1.5 went to production in January 2021, and version 2.0 shipped on 27 April 2021. The most consequential release was Overledger Network on 13 September 2021: a network of gateways initially covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, with operators licensed in QNT. Polkadot mainnet support followed in version 2.2.5, Tokenise in beta with QRC-20 tokens on Ethereum, Polygon and XDC arrived in version 2.2.9 in April 2023, and multi-factor authentication became mandatory in 2.2.25. The LACChain alliance, led by the Inter-American Development Bank's innovation lab, signed a memorandum in February 2021 to use Overledger as the interoperability gateway for its Besu-based network.

The 2021 peak and the quiet years

QNT's price history has one defining spike before the recent one. Coinbase Pro listed the token on 24 June 2021, and on 11 September 2021, two days before the Overledger Network launch, QNT hit its all-time high of $428.45 on Coinbase, or $427.42 on CoinGecko. The 2021 yearly range ran from under $10 to that peak. The 10 December 2021 announcement of a £100 annual licence payable in QNT gave the token its first explicit fee role.

What followed was a long consolidation rather than a collapse. The 2022 range was $41 to $226; 2023 ran between $84 and $162; 2024 between $51 and $171; 2025 between $59 and $135. Kraken listed QNT in March 2022 and Binance.US in November 2022. Quant consolidated its communications onto its website in 2022, dropping Medium and YouTube, and the token survived two exchange hot-wallet hacks, at LCX in January 2022 and Bitrue in April 2023, that affected exchange-held QNT only. Those years also produced the products that the bank chapter would be built on: the Overledger Platform SaaS on 27 June 2023 and Overledger Authorise on 10 October 2023. The price page charts the full series.

The bank chapter

The institutional story begins with Project Rosalind. The BIS Innovation Hub's London centre and the Bank of England ran the experiment through 2022 and 2023 to explore how an API layer could sit on a retail central bank digital currency. The final report of 16 June 2023 described 33 API functionalities and more than 30 use cases. The BIS names no vendors, but Quant announced the same day that it had supplied infrastructure within the vendor team, and launched the Overledger Platform eleven days later as the stack used in Rosalind.

In April 2024 UK Finance and EY chose R3 and Quant as technology providers for the UK Regulated Liability Network experimentation phase, with Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, Standard Chartered, Virgin Money, Mastercard and Visa as participants. The September 2024 report closed that phase. In May 2025 the European Central Bank named Quant Network Europe Limited among roughly seventy pioneers on its digital euro innovation platform, testing conditional payments against the ECB's specifications.

Then the pace changed. Quant Flow was announced on 22 May 2025, Fusion as a "Layer 2.5" a few days later, and on 26 September 2025 UK Finance selected Quant to build the Great British Tokenised Deposit platform for Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander, with Monzo joining in January 2026. QuantNet, described as a programmable settlement network, was announced within days. In 2026 the Dentsu Soken partnership for Japan (14 January), a Japanese patent for multi-ledger tokens (3 February), ISO/TS 23516 (March) and the Murex integration (25 March) arrived in quick succession, and the Fusion Rollup mainnet went live on 2 June with a claimed 74 connected networks.

On 24 September 2026 two announcements landed on the same day. UK Finance reported the first live customer transactions with tokenised sterling deposits on the Quant-built platform, two remortgage completions and a marketplace purchase across seven banks. The Clearing House, the US bank-owned operator of RTP and CHIPS, said it had selected Quant to provide the interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer for its On-Chain Money Initiative, with a network for member institutions due in the first half of 2027. QNT roughly doubled within three days. The CBDC page and the partnerships page cover each programme and what Quant's role actually was.

Where the story stands

Eleven years after incorporation Quant is a company with a shipped product family, two tokenised-deposit programmes with real banks, a rollup on mainnet and a token whose on-chain role is still being defined. The open questions are the ones the news page tracks: when Trusted Node staking opens to the public, whether the Clearing House network launches on schedule, and what the Bank of England decides about a digital pound. Reading the history is the best preparation for judging those announcements when they come, because the pattern is consistent: Quant announces, the counterparty confirms, and the price overreacts in both directions.