QNT tokenomics: supply, utility and distribution

The supply numbers

Quant's token is an ERC-20 on Ethereum with 18 decimals, deployed at contract address 0x4a220E6096B25EADb88358cb44068A3248254675. After the September 2018 burn the total supply settled at 14,612,493.080826178 QNT, and that is still the number today. The contract has no owner functions and no mint function (the EtherAuthority review cited in Quant's Blockworks transparency filing), so the total cannot rise.

Circulating supply, by Etherscan's and CoinGecko's count on 2 November 2026, was about 14,556,178 QNT, or 99.6% of the total. The gap of roughly 56,000 tokens is what the aggregators treat as locked or otherwise excluded. Blockworks' July 2026 filing cited Etherscan at 14,544,176, a slightly lower number, so the figure drifts a little over time as labels change. Holder count was 187,005 on Etherscan and 194,939 on Blockscout the same day; the two explorers count dust balances differently.

The 2018 sale and burn

Quant ran a pre-sale from 19 March to 1 April 2018 at 687 QNT per ETH (a 37.5% bonus) with 15 million tokens allocated, followed by the public token generation event from 2 to 30 April 2018 at 430 QNT per ETH, roughly $1.10 per token at the time. The public round offered 31 million QNT with a minimum cap of $5 million. In the end 9,964,259 QNT were sold for about $11 million, and tokens were distributed on 25 June 2018. The sale was run by the Swiss entity Quant Network AG in Zug, which is why Etherscan's ICO box lists Switzerland as the country.

Third-party trackers tell a slightly different story: ICO Drops records $26 million raised across rounds at $1.00 pre-sale and $1.51 public, and Etherscan's ICO panel shows $1.60. Quant's own transparency filing rejects the $26 million figure in favour of the Business Paper numbers above. Treat the exact public-sale price as disputed between $1.10 and $1.51; the quantity sold is not disputed.

On 14 September 2018 Quant burned the unsold allocation: 9,545,765.95 QNT. Quant's own announcement that day gave the resulting split as 9,964,259.03 public and 4,648,234.05 held by the company, summing to the 14,612,493.08 total. Blockworks breaks the company portion down further as roughly 2.6 million company reserve, 1.3 million founders and 651,000 advisors. Staff tokens vested over 12 months with a two-month transfer restriction, so no vesting overhang remains.

Circulating supply vs company holdings

Here the record gets murkier, and it is worth being clear about what is and is not known. At the burn in 2018 the company held 4,648,234 QNT, about 31.8% of the total. What Quant Network Ltd and its group companies hold today is not verified. The Blockworks filing notes an Etherscan-labelled figure of only about 68,000 QNT and does not reconcile it with the 2018 number. Community estimates of "around 2 million in treasury" circulate without a source. A tokenomics audit by 8blocks estimated that roughly 65% of supply sits in a single treasury-related address, which would be far more than the 2018 company share; that figure is also unverified.

What the aggregators call "circulating" (14.56 million, or 99.6%) therefore includes whatever the company holds, because none of those tokens is contractually locked. That is a reasonable convention, but it means "circulating" does not mean "freely traded". The practical implication for the QNT price is that the true float could be substantially smaller than the headline, which would help explain the token's sharp moves on modest volume.

Quant publishes no on-chain treasury dashboard and the token confers no governance rights, so there is no mechanism for holders to require disclosure. Blockworks marked its July 2026 filing "Partial, 6 gaps". If you want to inspect balances yourself, the transaction tracker page explains how to read holder lists on Etherscan and Blockscout.

No mining, no inflation, no staking rewards today

Three things people search for simply do not exist. There is no QNT mining: the token is an ERC-20 whose supply was created in one transaction in 2018, and Ethereum itself moved to proof of stake in 2022. There is no inflation: no emissions schedule, no block rewards, no treasury minting. And there are no protocol staking rewards at present: Ethereum validators stake ETH, not QNT, and Quant has said it runs no general staking scheme paying inflationary rewards because it has no inflation to pay them with.

What does exist is a set of custodial "earn" products on exchanges that pay small yields by lending QNT out, for example Kraken's flexible rewards at 0.1% APY. These are lending arrangements with counterparty risk, not staking. The staking page separates the real products from the marketing.

The one planned exception is trusted-node staking on the Fusion rollup, covered under utility below. Until its parameters are published it should be treated as a design intention, not a feature.

What QNT is used for

Overledger licence fees

On 10 December 2021 Quant introduced an annual Overledger licence fee of £100 for all live-platform customers and developers, payable in QNT, with the test platform remaining free and existing users due to pay from 15 March 2022. This created the first mandatory, if small, demand for the token. Quant's current FAQ says a platform fee can be paid in USD or by subscribing with QNT, with pricing on request, so the hard requirement has softened into an option.

Quant Treasury and locking

Quant's 2020 Overledger Network paper described a Treasury that converts fiat payments into QNT and uses layer-2 payment channels to pay gateway operators, so that enterprise customers never need to touch the token themselves. Licence QNT was widely reported to be locked for twelve months, but Quant's current site does not state a lock period, so treat the lock as unverified as a present-day mechanism. Gateway operators could also lock QNT in the Treasury to receive higher priority for their transactions under the 2021 design.

Fusion gas and trusted-node stake

The Fusion multi-ledger rollup, on mainnet since 2 June 2026, designates QNT as the token for gas and execution fees, and its design has KYC'd trusted-node operators staking QNT to process transactions and earn rewards. This is the most significant potential source of structural demand, because it would lock supply rather than merely spend it. As of November 2026 the minimum stake, lock period and reward rate are unpublished; public staking documentation on the developer hub was still marked under construction in September, and several trackers list the programme as upcoming.

What QNT does not do

QNT carries no governance, dividend, equity or shareholder rights. Quant Network Ltd controls the protocol as a corporate operator and will act as the Fusion sequencer. Bank deployments, including the UK tokenised sterling deposits platform and The Clearing House's network, have not stated that participants must buy or hold QNT. The Overledger and ecosystem pages explain the products that generate the company's revenue.

The MiCA white-paper discrepancy

If you look QNT up on CoinMarketCap or CoinPaprika you may see a maximum supply of 14,881,364 and a circulating supply of 12,072,738. Those figures appear to originate from a MiCA-format white paper quoted by CoinMarketCap and Bitrue. They do not match Etherscan, CoinGecko, Quant's 2018 burn announcement or the Blockworks filing, all of which give 14,612,493 total. We have not been able to see the primary document and cannot explain the 268,871-token difference in the maximum or the 2.48 million difference in circulating supply. Until Quant reconciles the two, this site uses the on-chain figures, and we flag the white-paper numbers as unverified rather than wrong.

The practical effect is real: at $200 per token the two circulating figures give market caps of $2.91 billion and $2.41 billion, and CoinGecko ranks QNT #35 while CoinPaprika ranks it #44. Anyone comparing Quant with other projects should check which supply their source is using.

Why fixed supply matters, and its limits

A fixed supply does three useful things for holders. It removes dilution: nobody's share of the network shrinks because new tokens were printed. It makes valuation arithmetic trivial: market cap divided by 14.56 million is the price, with no emissions curve to model. And it means that any new structural demand, such as node operators locking stake, has to be met from existing holders rather than fresh issuance, which is why thin-float tokens like QNT can move so sharply when demand changes.

But fixed supply guarantees nothing on its own. Supply is only half of the price; if demand for the token falls, a fixed supply falls in price just as readily as an inflationary one. Quant's token sits beside a business that can be paid in fiat, so the link between company success and token demand is weaker than for a token that is the only way to pay for the network. Concentration matters too: a small supply with a large, unverified treasury share means the tradeable float is smaller still, which cuts both ways. And a cap does not prevent the company issuing a successor token or changing how fees are charged; the fixed supply is a property of the contract, not a promise about the business model.

The honest summary is that QNT's tokenomics are clean, simple and verifiable on-chain, with one large unknown (company holdings) and one large pending change (Fusion staking). Whether those tokenomics translate into value depends on questions the price outlook and review pages take up.