Quant’s QNT token is up roughly 300% in the past week, pushing above $270, and 24-hour trading volume has topped $600 million.
The trigger was pretty plain. On Sept. 24, The Clearing House (TCH) said it had picked Quant as the technology provider for its On-Chain Money Initiative. Then, on Sept. 26, seven major U.K. banks — among them Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds — finished what the report called the first real customer payment transactions for tokenized pound deposits using Quant’s platform.
TCH clears and settles more than $2 trillion every day. It also runs core U.S. banking payment networks, including RTP, the real-time payments system, and CHIPS, the large-value interbank settlement network. The initiative includes 25 major U.S. banks and is expected to go live in the first half of 2027. Quant founder Gilbert Verdian described the partnership as “a decisive step in the global shift toward programmable money.”
Quant is not a blockchain operator. It sits between systems.
The report says the QNT rally looks a lot more logical once Quant’s job is understood. Quant does not operate its own blockchain. Its main product, Overledger, is an interoperability layer built so different blockchains and old-school systems can communicate and transact with each other.
In the bank model for tokenized deposits, Quant works as an orchestration layer. It manages clearing and settlement across different bank systems while remaining compatible with existing payment rails like RTP and CHIPS.
And that matters. Banks do not have to move everything onto one chain. Each institution can keep its own tech stack, while Quant handles the translation and coordination in the middle. For a network of 25 banks, the report says, forcing everyone onto the same chain would be unrealistic. It presents that as a main reason TCH chose Quant.
The U.K. rollout is already past the proof-of-concept stage and into production. The Sept. 26 transaction involved a real mortgage refinancing case, with funds released automatically after the property title transfer was confirmed. Simple as that. The report treats this as a jump from testnet-style demos to real customer payments using real money.
Tokenized deposits are different from stablecoins
One of the report’s main points is this: tokenized deposits are not the same as stablecoins.
USDC and USDT are stablecoins issued by non-bank entities and backed by reserve assets such as Treasuries and cash. Holders have a redemption claim against the issuer, but USDC itself is not a bank deposit and does not come with deposit insurance.
Tokenized deposits are different. They are bank liabilities issued by regulated commercial banks. They sit on bank balance sheets and are protected by deposit insurance. Tokenizing a deposit means using blockchain rails to record and transfer that bank liability without changing its legal nature. It is still a bank deposit.
For banks, the report says, tokenized deposits look better than stablecoins because they do not cause deposit disintermediation. Funds remain inside the banking system. Only the settlement method changes. That is also why TCH, which is owned by banks, is pushing tokenized deposits instead of adopting stablecoins.
How the report maps the trade beyond QNT
Canton Network (CC): the closest institutional comparison
Canton is a privacy-focused institutional blockchain network built by Digital Asset. The participant list cited in the report includes DTCC, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, Tradeweb, Deutsche Börse, HSBC, Broadridge, BNP Paribas and Visa.
JPMorgan’s JPMD tokenized deposit is already live on Canton, with the report listing January 2026 as the launch date. DTCC plans to use Canton for U.S. Treasury tokenization. Deutsche Börse’s digital securities settlement platform is also built on the network.
The difference from Quant is structural. Quant connects different systems. Canton provides one unified institutional transaction network. One is the translator. The other is the platform.
CC’s fully diluted valuation is estimated at about $5.5 billion, with a ranking around 24. Its fee model uses token burns: transaction fees are priced in dollars, paid in CC, and then burned. So network usage directly cuts supply. But there is a catch. Total supply is uncapped, and new issuance keeps coming through rewards for validators and application developers. The report says the real question is whether deflation can outrun issuance.
Canto (CANTO): a small-cap NeoFinance narrative
Canto is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 in the Cosmos ecosystem, pitched as “NeoFinance,” meaning public infrastructure for decentralized finance. Its core design is built around what the report calls “free public primitives”: a zero-fee DEX, a lending market based on a Compound v2 fork, and the NOTE stablecoin.
Canto has added RWA tokenization through Fortunafi and Hashnote, bringing U.S. Treasury yield on-chain. But Quant and Canton are aimed at bank infrastructure. Canto is framed instead as an RWA access layer for DeFi-native users, not interbank settlement infrastructure.
The report says CANTO’s market capitalization sits in the tens of millions of dollars, with limited liquidity and extremely high volatility. In its view, the token belongs in a high-beta, small-cap RWA trade, not in the same risk bucket as QNT or CC.
Chainlink (LINK): an indirect infrastructure beneficiary
Chainlink provides Data Streams, Proof of Reserve, NAVLink and CCIP for Canton. Chainlink Labs has also become a super validator for the Canton Global Synchronizer. In Swift’s pilot for tokenized asset settlement, Chainlink is listed as a core technology provider too.
LINK is not a pure tokenized-deposit trade. Still, every move banks make toward on-chain infrastructure raises demand for oracles and cross-chain messaging. The report describes LINK as a “picks and shovels” asset for the theme.
XRP and XLM: the older payments-settlement narrative
Ripple’s XRP and Stellar’s XLM have long been attached to the cross-border payments and settlement story. But the report says their positioning differs in one important respect from tokenized deposit infrastructure. XRP and XLM lean more toward becoming payment networks that replace SWIFT, while Quant and Canton lean more toward adding a blockchain settlement layer to existing bank systems.
So the framing is pretty stark: one path is replacement, the other is upgrade. With the SEC having just granted an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, and with TCH choosing Quant, the report argues that the direction preferred by the banking system is getting easier to read: use blockchain technology to upgrade banks, not crypto networks to replace them. On that reading, Quant and Canton could benefit more directly, while the long-running XRP and XLM story faces quieter pressure.