“Proven technology that can scale” — what The Clearing House wants from Quant by the second quarter of 2027

The documented position: the bank network for which Quant is supplying the technology is to process its first real transactions in the second quarter of 2027. That is 163 days away. This article sets out which stages have to be ticked off by then, which of them already stand, and what the timetable has to be measured against. Anyone holding Quant (QNT), or thinking about it, gets something more concrete than a year. Our own assessment follows in a separate section below.

The Clearing House roadmap: four steps to the second quarter of 2027

David Watson, president and chief executive officer of The Clearing House, described the sequence publicly in early August 2026, seven weeks before it was even settled who would build the technology. He named four steps: first the selection of the technology partner, then joint work with the banks on design and connectivity in the autumn, in the first quarter of 2027 the preparation of the first institutions and their customers, and in the second quarter of 2027 live transactions.

That sequence is useful for a simple reason: the plan makes the timetable verifiable. An organisation that says only "first half of 2027" keeps its cards hidden to the end. An organisation that names four stages delivers interim markers at which any delay shows up early. It is along exactly that grid that the position in October 2026 can be read off.

One qualification belongs right next to it. Neither the June release nor the September one names a list of the institutions taking part at launch, a price, or a regulatory approval. The September release says expressly that further detail on participation and use cases will be announced as development progresses. That is the soft spot of the whole undertaking, and it remains so for now.

Stage one is ticked off: the choice fell on Quant on September 24

On September 24, 2026 The Clearing House announced in a release that Quant is supplying the technology for the On-Chain Money Initiative. The role is narrowly drawn in the release: Quant provides the layer for interoperability, orchestration and transaction management through which the clearing and settlement of tokenised deposits is coordinated, plus the connection to the existing payment systems. Named there are RTP for real-time payments and CHIPS for settling large amounts between banks.

Sal Karakaplan, chief strategy officer of The Clearing House, justified the choice in the release with a sentence that sets the bar for the coming months: "Building interbank infrastructure for tokenized deposits requires proven technology that can scale." Gilbert Verdian, founder and chief executive officer of Quant, spoke of a decisive step in the global transition to programmable money.

For context, what matters is what this mandate is not. It is a supplier decision by an operator that, by its own account, has 25 of the country's largest financial institutions as owners. It is not a commitment by any individual bank to take part at launch, and it says nothing about remuneration. The June release does at least name 17 participating institutions, among them Bank of America, BNY, Citi, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Payments, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

Stage two is under way: design and connectivity with the banks in autumn 2026

This is exactly the stage the project is at today. On Watson's sequence, The Clearing House has been working with the banks on design and connectivity since the autumn. That is the phase in which it is decided whether the rest holds, and at the same time the phase from which least reaches the outside world: integration work between core banking systems produces no press releases.

It can be checked all the same, just indirectly. Between the selection of the partner on September 24, 2026 and the start of the second quarter on April 1, 2027 lie 189 days. In that half-year a supplier decision has to become a network that connects banks to two existing payment systems and reconciles entries between them. If the preparation of the first institutions does not become visible in the first quarter, the second quarter is no longer tenable.

What the network is meant to do is in the release of June 5, 2026, and it is more demanding than a plain transfer: automated workflows, richer transaction data and round-the-clock settlement. The use cases it names include programmable treasury, real-time liquidity management, cross-border payments and digital asset settlement.

Stages three and four: preparation in the first quarter, transactions in the second quarter of 2027

For the last two stages Watson names the order but no volumes. In the first quarter of 2027 the first banks and their customers are to be prepared, and in the second quarter transactions are to run. Who goes first is, on his account, not an open question: the demand comes from the treasury departments of large corporates, above all those running accounts at many institutions at once.

His example makes the purpose tangible. A company shifts $100 million from a tokenised deposit at Citi to one at J.P. Morgan. Today such a shift hangs on cut-off times and reconciliation runs. In a shared network it would be a single entry that both sides see at the same moment. Watson drew a clear line against stablecoins: those are serviceable for international person-to-person payments and for moving into and out of crypto assets, but unwieldy for large corporate flows because they tie up liquidity.

What Sibos in Miami showed: an unwind in the middle of a repo

From September 28 to October 1, 2026, Quant demonstrated at the Sibos banking conference in Miami, together with the software house Murex, what such an entry can look like. What was shown was a repo trade in US dollars against a tokenised US Treasury, with the cash leg running over tokenised deposits. Murex and Quant have been working together since March 2026; clients of the MX.3 trading platform reach the issuance of tokenised deposits and digital bonds through it.

The revealing part of the demonstration was not the completion but the abort. By its own account, Quant deliberately interrupted the transaction mid-execution to show that the process can be fully unwound without a half-booked state being left behind. For banks that is the real test. A network that works in the normal case is worthless if an abort leaves money suspended between two firms. That this case was demonstrated publicly is a signal to the risk departments, not to the crypto market.

The qualification that goes with it: a demonstration at a conference is not operation at real volumes. What is shown is that the process can be represented technically, not that it will hold at 25 institutions simultaneously in 2027. How the technology underneath is built we took apart in our explainer on Overledger and Fusion.

The British precedent: seven banks, two remortgages, one marketplace purchase

On that same September 24, 2026, the industry body UK Finance reported that seven British banks had completed the first real customer transactions with tokenised sterling deposits. Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander took part. The shared platform is called Great British Tokenised Deposits, GBTD for short, and was likewise built by Quant.

Two kinds of process were shown. In two property-loan remortgages the money was locked and released automatically on completion, which on UK Finance's account reduces manual checks and delays in settlement. In a purchase on a consumer marketplace the buyer's money stayed locked until the goods had changed hands. Jana Mackintosh, responsible for payments and innovation at UK Finance, read that as evidence that tokenised deposits give customers more control over their money. Further pilots are to link tokenised customer money with digital assets.

That precedent is the strongest reason to take the US timetable seriously. The supplier has already brought a comparable platform as far as a real customer transaction, with seven firms that otherwise compete.

The arithmetic that makes the timetable tight: 388 days for a handful of payments

That same British precedent also supplies the strongest counter-argument, and it sits in the intervals. UK Finance had announced the GBTD pilot in September 2025; around 388 days passed before the first real customer transactions. The result after a good year was individual transactions at seven banks, building on the groundwork of the Regulated Liability Network.

Now the counter-calculation for the United States: from the announcement of the initiative on June 5, 2026 to the start of the second quarter of 2027 it is 300 days. In that shorter span the plan is not a pilot with a handful of transactions but a network that, per the June release, is to be open to institutions of every size in the United States, connected to two existing payment systems. Britain took longer for less, and that in a smaller banking market.

This arithmetic does not refute the timetable. All it shows is where it breaks, if it breaks: not on the technology demonstrated in Miami, but on the number of firms that have to be connected at the same time. A launch in the second quarter of 2027 with three or four institutions would be on time and still a long way from what the June release promises.

RTP and CHIPS: connecting to the old rails is the hardest part

The part of the mandate that sounds least like blockchain is probably the most laborious. RTP and CHIPS have been running in production for years and handle the payment traffic of large US banks. A new network that settles tokenised deposits is only serviceable for the parties involved if money moves back and forth between the two worlds without a break.

The mechanism behind it is the reason banks want tokenised deposits at all. A tokenised deposit remains a claim against the bank that holds the balance. The balance does not leave the balance sheet, unlike money a customer exchanges into a private issuer's stablecoin. The payment becomes programmable without the institution losing deposits. What is missing is the shared layer over which such balances can be moved between firms, and that layer is precisely the mandate.

What is running in parallel in Europe: the ECB's Pontes has been live since September 21

For investors in Germany the obvious question is what of this arrives here. Directly, nothing at first: The Clearing House network is a project of the US banking sector and geared to US payment systems. In the euro area, development runs separately and on a different kind of money.

The European Central Bank brought Pontes into operation on September 21, 2026. Pontes connects market DLT platforms with the TARGET services so that trades on such platforms can be settled in central bank money. Under the ECB's rules, access is open to, among others, entities with access to T2, authorised central securities depositories and operators of settlement systems under the DLT pilot regime. German banks therefore reach Pontes through their existing T2 access.

The difference is not only geographical. In the United States a network for tokenised commercial bank money is being built, in Europe a bridge to central bank money. Both solve the same task for different kinds of money, and both will decide over the medium term which infrastructure banks use for tokenised securities. For the German market the regulatory position is clearer than often portrayed: a tokenised deposit is a deposit in supervisory terms and therefore does not fall under the rules that apply to stablecoins. What applies to crypto asset service providers in the EU we have set out in our overview of the MiCA obligations.

Does the token earn from the business? The question is still open

This is the point at which an article about Quant has to be honest. The Clearing House mandate went to the company Quant and its software. Whether and how the QNT token shares in it economically is not apparent from either release. The September release names Quant as the technology provider and does not mention the token.

The connection is documented elsewhere: the licence fee for Overledger is payable in QNT. What is not documented is to what extent running a network at The Clearing House triggers that fee, and whether the gap between software revenue and token demand turns out large or small. Equate the price move with the mandate and you are buying an expectation, not a demonstrated payment flow.

The price action since our last update shows how strongly that expectation is now priced in. On September 26, 2026, shortly after the announcement, QNT traded at $104.88. On October 20 the price stands at $195.43, or €173.92, a gain of 86.3 percent in a good three weeks. Market value is around $2.85 billion, rank 39. The record high of $427.42 from September 2021 remains a long way off. Data services differ on the circulating supply; CoinGecko reports 14,556,178 QNT. Since our article on the Fusion rollup of October 18 little has happened to the price, with a loss of 4.3 percent over seven days.

Our assessment: the timetable is plausible, the launch scale is not

From this newsroom's point of view, the roadmap to the second quarter of 2027 holds up. Three evidenced points support that: stage one was completed on September 24, the supplier demonstrated with GBTD on the same day that it can bring seven competing banks onto one platform, and the Sibos demonstration in late September showed the failure case rather than just the normal case. Against it stands the question of volume: 300 days from announcement to target date is less than Britain needed for a smaller undertaking, and to this day there is no list of the institutions taking part at launch. What is likely, therefore, is an on-time launch with a small cast, not the network for institutions of every size from the June release. For the token little follows from that: the link between network operation and QNT demand has still not been publicly quantified. A total loss is always possible with any single crypto asset.

QNT in Germany: trading venues, licensing and the holding period

Anyone wanting to buy QNT in Germany will find euro pairs at Kraken, Bitvavo and Bit2Me among others; at most other venues trading runs against US dollars or stablecoins. Before a first purchase it is worth looking at the provider's licence: since the European crypto regulation, service providers need an authorisation, which can be read up at the provider itself. Which firms hold that authorisation is shown by our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

For tax, section 23 of the German Income Tax Act continues to apply to private individuals in Germany: a sale within a year of purchase is a private disposal, and after a year has passed the gain remains tax-free. Because that period is currently the subject of political work, it is worth checking the current state of the reform before deciding. The exemption threshold for other private disposals is €1,000 per year; exceed it and the entire gain is taxable.

Tokenised deposits: without a participant list, 2027 stays a date

The timetable stands, the cast does not. Three steps help in reading the coming months rather than reacting to headlines:

1. Wait for the interim position in the first quarter of 2027. If the preparation of the first institutions and their customers does not become public by the end of March, the second-quarter date is in danger. Anyone intending to buy crypto assets in that period anyway should compare the costs of the crypto exchanges first.
2. Watch the participant list, not the technology. The decisive number is how many of the 25 owner banks are booking at launch. Judge the provider by its authorisation, not by its reach; the regulated exchanges are listed in the comparison.
3. Document your own holding period. Anyone holding QNT in expectation of the launch should record the purchase date and purchase price cleanly, because the one-year period decides the tax. The tax tools and portfolio trackers in the comparison help with that.

(As of October 20, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)