What Is Quant (QNT)? The Overledger Interoperability Token

Quant (QNT), the token behind the Overledger interoperability platform, is the Ethereum token that the software company Quant chose as payment for Overledger licences. Overledger connects the systems of banks and other financial firms to blockchains, and Quant made its annual licence fee payable in QNT in December 2021.

QNT's contract reports a supply of 45,467,000 tokens, but the chain shows only about 24.4 million were ever minted, all on 25 June 2018. About 9.55 million of those were sent to the token contract's own address in September 2018 and cannot be moved by any function in its code, which leaves about 14.88 million that can move.

Quant (QNT) at a Glance

What Is Quant Crypto Used For?

Quant crypto's documented use is paying the licence fee for Overledger, the product Quant sells to banks and other financial firms. Quant calls Overledger a universal API connector between traditional financial systems and blockchain networks. An API is the doorway one program uses to send requests to another. A bank's software sends Overledger one kind of request, and Overledger handles the different rules of each blockchain behind it.

That saves a firm from building and maintaining its own link to every chain it wants to use. The same page lists running one application's smart contracts across several chains. It also lists cross-chain transfers for jobs such as cross-border payments and asset tokenisation, the business of putting tokenized real-world assets like bonds and deposits on a blockchain.

The token comes in at the billing stage. In December 2021, Quant's post introducing the Overledger licence fee set it at £100 a year for "all customers and developers on the platform" and said "the licence fee is payable in QNT."

The fee covered only the live network, and the test platform stayed free. Existing live users got three extra free months, which pushed their first payment to March 2022.

At £100 a year, the fee was priced like a software subscription. It gave QNT a real job inside Quant's product, but how much QNT that job needs depends on the number of paying licences. Neither Quant's fee post nor its Overledger page counts them, so you can't size that demand from either.

How Many QNT Tokens Are There?

The 45,467,000 that QNT's contract reports is a number written into its code in 2018. The contract's mint function adds new tokens to a holder's balance without touching that total, so the figure doesn't track how many tokens exist.

Counting the mints on the chain gives the real figure. QNT's 608 mints all happened on 25 June 2018, and they add up to about 24.43 million tokens. That count covers every block from the contract's launch in April 2018 to the early-November close.

On 14 September 2018, the address that created QNT sent about 9.55 million of them to the token contract itself. A token contract can't sign a transfer of its own, and QNT's code has no function that moves the contract's balance. So those tokens are stuck for good. Another 245 small transfers had added about 5,100 QNT to the same address by early November.

Take away that balance and the 0.117 QNT held at a dead address, one people use to put tokens out of reach, and the supply that can move comes to about 14.88 million. That's about a third of the figure the contract reports.

CoinMarketCap's total of 14.88 million came within about a thousand tokens of the chain count, while CoinGecko listed 14.61 million. Their circulating figures split further, at about 12.07 million and 14.56 million. Both sites also label their totals a "max supply". Check which figure a chart uses before you compare QNT's market value with another coin's.

Can Anyone Still Mint More QNT?

Only one smart contract can mint QNT. It's the sale contract created in April 2018 by the same address that deployed the token, just before the token itself.

That contract has two ways to create tokens. One records presale purchases made before it launched, and the other sells QNT for ETH and forwards that ETH to its owner address. Both deliver new tokens only when the owner address tells the contract to.

Going by its published code, the owner address can still mint about 6.47 million QNT as presale purchases with no ETH paid. It can also keep raising the sale's ceiling, so the code sets no fixed limit. That's what the code allows, not what has happened. By early November the address had been idle since June 2019, and every QNT minted by then dated from 25 June 2018.

What to watch: any new QNT would show up on an Ethereum block explorer as a transfer from the zero address, because that's how the token's code records a mint.

Is Quant a Scam?

You can check each of these facts yourself on Ethereum, in the token's own code or its on-chain history.

• QNT's token contract has verified source code, a full match on Sourcify, a public service that compiles published code and compares it with what runs on the chain.

• QNT didn't launch through a launchpad. Quant sold it through its own sale contract, and the June 2018 mints delivered exactly what that contract had recorded as sold, plus 14,467,000 tokens set aside for its owner address at launch.

• The token contract has no owner and no burn function. It also has no way to freeze a wallet or block an address, so the contract can't stop your QNT from moving.

• The one open power in the code is the minting covered above, and it sits with the sale contract's owner address.

None of that covers price risk or how many firms pay for Overledger. It does mean the token's rules sit in code anyone can read, and that code hasn't changed since 2018.

How to Buy QNT Safely

Phemex lists QNT on its QNT/USDT spot market, which opened in March 2022. Its QNT/USDT perpetual was listed again in October 2026, after Phemex delisted it in August 2026 following a notice.

1. Open a Phemex account and add USDT to it.

2. Buy QNT on the QNT/USDT spot market with a limit order, so you set the price you pay.

3. To hold QNT yourself, withdraw it to a non-custodial wallet on Ethereum, where only you hold the keys.

4. Check the token in your wallet against QNT's Ethereum contract address, 0x4a220e6096b25eadb88358cb44068a3248254675. Copies of QNT on other networks carry other addresses.

5. Keep a little ETH in the same wallet, since every QNT transfer on Ethereum pays its network fee in ETH.

The perpetual lets you trade QNT's price with leverage of up to 50x. Futures use leverage, and a leveraged position is closed automatically if losses push its margin below a set minimum, which is called liquidation in crypto trading.

QNT's perpetual closed the early-November day almost flat at about $194.7, while the median of Phemex's 68 USDT- and USDC-margined crypto perpetuals rose about 2.3%.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is QNT?

QNT is Quant's ERC-20 token, a standard token type on Ethereum, so it has no blockchain of its own. Its documented use is paying Overledger's licence fee. It isn't QNTX or Quantus (QTC), and it has nothing to do with the "quant" of quantitative trading.

Can Quant Be the Next Bitcoin?

They're built for different jobs. Bitcoin is a currency that runs on its own blockchain. QNT is an Ethereum token made to pay for one company's software licences, a much narrower job than a currency's.

Is QNT on Phemex?

Yes. You can trade QNT on Phemex's QNT/USDT spot market or on its QNT/USDT perpetual, which came back in October 2026 after an August 2026 delisting.

Bottom Line

QNT's own contract shows 45.5 million tokens, and the supply that can move is closer to a third of that. Most of the gap is a number typed into the code that minting never matched, plus a pile of tokens parked where no code can reach them.

The figure we'd watch isn't the price or a tracker's total. It's the count of new mints, which stood at zero for more than eight years, and only one idle address can change it.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.