We had a strong year in 2022, establishing many foundational activities helping our customers realise their ambitions for digital assets and tokenisation. Gilbert Verdian shares his top eight accomplishments for the year.
You’ve seen many exciting Quant updates: new product updates, partnerships and perspectives on the most topical issues facing distributed ledger technology and digital assets. This year has been hugely positive, and I’m incredibly proud of our team, who’ve worked hard putting us in an optimum position for growth. We’ve built bespoke solutions for the financial services industry to innovate at pace.
Every day, more banks, exchanges, asset managers and large companies are beginning to work with DLTs to transform how we pay, move money and goods. And we’ve helped them implement new technology projects and use digital assets and tokenised money to transact more effectively in a digital age.
Here are my top eight takeaways from the year:
1. A focus on growth
We’ve expanded our team by 74%, adding key roles in Product, Engineering, HR and Marketing. In so doing, we’ve put a focus on strengthening our culture, aligning with our core values and hiring a diverse, multinational team.
We’ve put in place an adaptable working policy at our London office that supports the work/life balance of our team and , re-energise employees and further creative thinking. Inclusivity is also critical. Frequent communication, trust and transparency has helped keep the team working in the same direction.
2. Improving Overledger, our low-code API Gateway for blockchains
This year, we issued 22 new releases of Overledger, roughly every two weeks, with new functionality, including:
- Secure smart contracts: Customers can now quickly and easily create enterprise-grade, highly secure smart contracts. Using templates, customers can choose pre-set attributes and functionalities for the type of smart contract desired. Users can then use a REST/JSON API to conduct various payment operations through Overledger’s API.
- QRC-20 tokens: The ability to issue and mint new QRC-20 interoperable digital assets and tokens that are built for institutional use cases, such as commercial stablecoins.
- Blockchain based payments: Released our Overledger endpoints to perform blockchain-based payments and account management functions as a foundation to power CBDCs and stablecoins.
- User interface: Launched beta-version of a new tokenisation API with a new user interface to easily view and deploy tokens.
- New support of distributed ledger networks: We added new support for popular DLNs, including Polygon, Polkadot, Ethereum Goerli testnet (proof-of-stake), XDC and Hyperledger Fabric.
3. Scaling our engineering team and processes
Our people are vital to conceiving, building and deploying our products. We’ve added two new agile teams to our engineering team to make it easier for us to scale. We implemented a new continuous development and delivery process and retooled our CI/CD pipelines to use Jenkins-X and Tekton.
4. Blockchain for Beginner’s Course with King’s College London
It’s amazing to consider there are 27 million developers worldwide without specialist blockchain knowledge. And this emerging technology is expected to be a $39.7bn market by 2025. To meet this need, we launched a three-week course with King’s College London to help aspiring blockchain developers learn about DLT and how to build applications using Overledger. Over 2,300 people have taken our course, ranking it highly– 4.7 out of 5.0.
5. Deepened our relationship with LACChain
LACChain is a pan-regional blockchain programme across 12 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to promote financial inclusion and sustainability and to create new efficiencies through digitization.
We’ve connected Overledger to LACChain to bring new possibilities and efficiencies to consumers, institutions and businesses. There are exciting use cases for interbank cross-border clearing and settlement. In particular, we’ve developed a proof-of-concept use case for people to purchase gift cards tokens in fiat currency, redeemable as credit with specific merchants on the LACChain network. This offers similar functionality to a traditional, cross-border payment without friction, inter-banking delays and network costs.
6. Revitalised our brand, marketing and communications
Earlier this year, we relaunched our website with more colour, content, and a new user journey to better engage with customers, developers and partners. Every week, we share educational content, product updates and offer insights into leading stories impacting DLT, digital assets, tokenised money, and regulatory issues. We’ve been consistently featured in business and top financial publications, advocating for best practices in CBDC development, balanced regulation and the need for international technical standards for blockchain and protocol development.
7. Participated in top global forums for financial services
After the pandemic, we’ve made the most out of attending and speaking at online and live events. We participated in the Financial Times’s Crypto & Digital Assets summit, Sibos, Innovate Finance’s Fintech Week London, IETF and panel sessions with the Future of Finance, INATBA and the Digital Pound Foundation.
8. Partnership with UST to accelerate institutional digital assets
Lastly, we partnered with UST, a sizeable digital technology company with 30,000 employees in 25 countries, to help us accelerate work on digital assets and tokenization across financial services. Our partnership will facilitate the issuance of central bank digital currencies, digital money in the form of commercial stablecoins and digital securities onto major distributed ledger networks. By working with us, enterprises, banks and capital markets participants will also be able to shorten the lifecycle of their blockchain projects to just a few weeks.
Looking to the future
I’m thankful and very grateful to the team at Quant for all their support. We’ve built an incredible foundation to unlock blockchain and realise the future of finance. We have so much to look forward to in the months ahead. We want to unleash additional solutions for developers, and there are exciting projects in the pipeline as well as new capabilities planned for Overledger. The market is ripe for easy-to-use, low-code, secure DLT solutions, and we’re in a great place for continued growth. We’ll keep you posted.
