A Quant (QNT) holder who accumulated the cryptocurrency in 2019 has transferred 9,000 QNT, worth about $2m, to Coinbase and Kraken, securing an 884% gain based on an average purchase price of $22.57.
On-chain trackers identified the transactions early on Tuesday and described the wallet as a seven-year holding. The address had previously withdrawn 53,632.95 QNT from major exchanges between May 2019 and November 2022, when the tokens were worth about $1.21m.
The latest transfers were made when QNT was priced at $222.09, according to the tracker’s post. That figure produced the reported 884% return, which was widely circulated after screenshots of the transaction appeared online.
However, the activity did not all originate from a single wallet. Records on Blockscout trace the funds back to an original 2019 address that received QNT in several batches from May 2019 to January 2021, followed by two further deposits in November 2022. The wallet then remained largely inactive.
The holder had reduced the position during the 2022 rally, waited almost four years and has now begun selling into another sharp rise. The division of holdings between new addresses before a sale is a common method of keeping individual transactions smaller and reducing the visible record of a large disposal.
The latest price move followed an announcement from The Clearing House on 24 September. The US bank-owned payments operator selected Quant to provide the coordination layer for its On-Chain Money Initiative, which is designed to support tokenised deposits.
The initiative will represent bank deposits as digital tokens capable of settling instantly. It will connect with the RTP and CHIPS payment rails and is scheduled to launch in the first half of 2027.
On the same day, UK Finance confirmed that live tokenised sterling payments had been completed on Quant’s platform with Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Natwest and Santander.
QNT climbed from about $61 on 16 September to an intraday peak of $373 on 27 September. That left it about 13% below its 2021 high of $430, while the token also rose to the top of CoinGecko’s trending list.
The rally came as bitcoin remained broadly stable, trading close to $83,000 throughout the week. Bitcoin.com News reported that bitcoin held above that level even after 13,800 BTC left Binance in a single day. On Tuesday morning, about $500m in leveraged positions were liquidated after bitcoin fell below $83,000.
QNT, by contrast, was trading near $268, around four times its price in mid-September.
The newly used wallets also attracted suspected address-poisoning attempts. Between 04:41 and 05:35 UTC, the wallet that transferred 2,000 QNT to Kraken received zero-value QNT transactions sent to two addresses whose opening and closing characters resembled the genuine Kraken deposit address.
Address poisoning involves placing a look-alike address in a wallet’s transaction history in the hope that the owner copies it for a later payment. The wallet still held 8,000 QNT, making an accidental transfer potentially costly.
