The story
Paolo Tasca is the academic co-founder of Quant. Independent round-ups (including Kraken Learn) record him joining in 2017 as Chief Strategist alongside Colin Paterson as CTO; his edX biography still calls him co-founder of ‘blockchain unicorn Quant’ and a patent holder of Overledger. By 2022 he was no longer with the company. The documents remain: he is one of four authors of the 2018 Overledger whitepaper, and a named inventor on US11842335B2. This encyclopedia treats that as founding authorship, not a current job title.
The career around it is digital economics. He was Lead Economist on digital currencies and peer-to-peer financial systems at the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt. He founded and directed the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies — later Executive Director of the UK Centre for Blockchain Technologies, a UCL–Oxford–Birmingham joint initiative — and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Zurich Blockchain Center. He has advised the European Parliament and the United Nations on DLT. His own site lists advisory and committee work with Hedera, Ripple, INATBA and ISO. Exponential Science, which he chairs, puts the citation count at 70+ peer-reviewed articles and 4,000+ citations.
The books are the philosophy Overledger occupies. Banking Beyond Banks and Money (Springer, 2016) asked what remains of a bank when money is software — three years before the whitepaper. Enabling the Internet of Value (Springer, 2022, with Horst Treiblmaier) treats blockchain as connective tissue for global business, not as a speculative venue. The 2020 Frontiers essay ‘Internet of Value: A Risky Necessity’ is the short version: moving value as easily as packets is coming, and with it datafication, platformisation and privacy risk. He has also co-edited Blockchain Economics and Digital Assets: Pricing, Allocation and Regulation, and contributed to The FinTech Book.
The join to Quant is specific. A gateway OS is one engineered answer to the problem his books pose: put a governed layer in front of many ledgers so regulated institutions do not have to become exchanges. The risk does not disappear; it is concentrated where it can be audited. Read the whitepaper and the Frontiers essay together. Do not read a current Quant executive into Exponential Science or the UK CBT.