The story
Gilbert Verdian founded Quant to connect the networks he had spent a career defending. The public claim is unusually stable for a crypto-era company: Overledger is a gateway operating system, not a twelfth blockchain. Applications should move value the way TCP/IP moved packets — across whatever ledger or legacy rail already exists. That sentence is in the 2018 whitepaper he signed with Paolo Tasca, Colin Paterson and Gaetano Mondelli, in the US ordering patent the four of them invented, and in the three-layer digital-money essay he published in April 2026.
The career behind it is cybersecurity, not token marketing. Quant’s own page records more than twenty years as CISO, CIO and CTO. In government: Downing Street, HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, and NSW Health in Australia, where he spent two and a half years as CISO before returning to London. In the private sector: HSBC, BP, PwC, EY, CSC, then Vocalink, the Mastercard company that runs the UK’s payment infrastructure. At Vocalink he was CISO for the stack that includes BACS, Faster Payments, LINK and the cheque-and-credit schemes — the rails the Bank of England actually cares about. In 2017 the Cyber Security Awards named him CISO of the Year. In May 2018 he left that role to work on Quant full time.
The standards thread starts earlier. In 2015, while the industry was still arguing about coins, he established the Blockchain ISO Standard TC307 initiative. He chairs the UK’s BSI DLT/1 committee — the national mirror — and convenes ISO WG7 on interoperability. ISO/TS 23516:2026 is the framework that work produced: DLT to DLT, and DLT to the world outside the ledger. A decade of vocabulary so that ‘interoperability’ does not mean twelve proprietary bridges.
What he is not: a central banker, a BIS mandate, or the issuer of GBTD tokens. Quant is the technology partner UK Finance selected for tokenised sterling deposits. The money remains a commercial-bank liability. Verdian’s published map puts that money on layer 2 of a three-layer stack, with wholesale central-bank money on layer 1, public-chain stablecoins on layer 3, and Overledger as the horizontal layer that has to talk to all three and to SWIFT, Faster Payments and Open Banking. Read the whitepaper, the patent and the 2026 essay before any homepage.