Quant’s new “Above the Ledger” paper may have just clarified the entire Pontes thesis. $QNT The interesting question isn’t necessarily: Does Quant power Pontes? It’s what coordinates the banks, ledgers and financial systems BEFORE settlement reaches Pontes? Pontes is the Eurosystem’s new infrastructure connecting market DLTs to TARGET so tokenised assets can settle in central-bank money. Simplified: Market DLT → Pontes → TARGET → central-bank settlement. But settlement is only the bottom of the stack. Banks still need to coordinate customer instructions, compliance, liquidity, treasury, asset systems, deposit systems, different DLTs and existing infrastructure before a transaction ever reaches final settlement. That is exactly what Quant’s new paper separates out. Above the ledger: Economic intent Institutional control Programmability Orchestration At the ledger: Execution Settlement Quant defines orchestration as: “Coordination of the transaction lifecycle and its evidence.” Now look at DZ BANK. DZ BANK is one of the institutions onboarded to Pontes. It also runs Murex MX.3 deeply across its capitalmarkets infrastructure. Then in March 2026, Murex integrated Quant directly into MX.3 for tokenised deposits, digital bonds and digital-asset settlement. So we now have a documented chain: Quant → MX.3 → DZ BANK → Pontes That does NOT prove DZ BANK is using Quant for Pontes. But it puts Quantenabled infrastructure inside a bank that is actively participating in Pontes. And DZ BANK itself has presented a Pontes use case around: “Connecting banks’ systems for atomic 24/7 payment.” That language matters. Because three days after Pontes launched, The Clearing House selected Quant in the US for: interoperability orchestration transaction management connecting tokenised deposits to existing payment rails like RTP and CHIPS. That gives us a real control case. US: Tokenised deposits → Quant orchestration → RTP / CHIPS Europe:Banks + multiple DLTs → ? → Pontes → TARGET That ? is the sauce. And the historical European trail makes it even more interesting. 2019: SIA integrates Overledger into SIAchain for DLT interoperability. 11 days later: SIA wins the ECB ESMIG connectivity concession. 2020: SIA says the Overledger integration was successfully completed and would move toward a commercial go to market phase. SIA later becomes part of Nexi. Today, Nexi and SWIFT are the two network providers giving institutions access to ESMIG/TARGET. Again: this does NOT prove Overledger is inside Pontes or Nexi’s ESMIG service. BUT ZOOM OUT: Quant → SIAchain interoperability SIA → Nexi → ESMIG/TARGET Quant → MX.3 MX.3 → DZ BANK DZ BANK → Pontes Quant → TCH orchestration Then Quant publishes a paper arguing that the durable layer for banks sits above the ledger, coordinating transactions while final settlement remains with the designated rail. That looks a lot less like “Quant needs to run Pontes.” And a lot more like: Pontes provides the settlement rail. Quant is positioning for the orchestration layer above rails like Pontes. The missing receipt is now extremely specific: DZ BANK + MX.3 + Quant + Pontes or Nexi + Overledger + Pontes Find either one and the architecture becomes much harder to ignore. Maybe Sibos this week finishes this puzzle. 👊⏳️ Above the ledger: quant.network/perspectives/a… $QNT