QNT Exploded. HBAR surged. But That's Not What I've Been Thinking About.

September 28, 2026

Alex Hollingsworth | A Stock Story

Quick note: Not financial advice. I’m sharing how I think, not what you should do. Talk to a qualified financial advisor about your own situation.

Hey everybody,

It has been a while since I wrote my last post. A lot longer than I originally planned. For anyone who didn't see my post on YouTube a few days ago, the last few months threw a wrench into my life. I injured my right wrist in Jiu Jitsu, and couldn't use my hand for most things. As this started to become manageable my arm had weakened, and I ended up tearing my rotator cuff also.

I have been working through rehabbing this, and just in the past few days it is finally getting normal where I can sleep comfortably and not have to use the sling as much. Yesterday was the first full day of no sling on my arm which is really awesome.

The Tokens We Get

I also recently made a decision to delete quite a few time-wasting apps off my phone which were especially taking up a lot of my time on the weekend. Yesterday, for the first time in a while I felt like I was back in the early 2000s again with not much of anything to look at on my phone 😂. I was just sitting around my kitchen, and I thought to myself "I need to call my old friend."

We hadn't spoken in almost 5 years (since Jan 2022). I was commenting that "I will call soon" becomes a year which becomes 5 years or even a decade. Without going into too much detail, a few years ago he was ejected from an open top, antique vehicle with no seatbelts. He struck his head on a concrete wall, broke his spine, skull, went into a coma and was almost killed.

I was thinking before I called him that if I hadn't deleted those apps, that I may have not called him at all. I probably would have spent the day mindlessly looking at my phone.

As a quick aside, I spend a good amount of my life thinking about tokens. QNT, HBAR, XRP, as well as BTC, KTA, LINK, and a number of others. We look at these tokens, study how many exist, study whether they are scarce, what might increase their value, and whether the project is using them wisely. But we also all have another type of token that is absolutely fixed and becoming more scarce every day. This token is our time.

Interestingly my friend was telling me yesterday how since his accident he viewed time differently, and I was telling him my analogy I like to use of our time as just a bucket every single day filled with about 4 tokens per hour that represent the useful moments in our lives to achieve something.

The crazy thing about these tokens is that they have almost unlimited utility. You can use them to build a business, learn something new, pick up a new hobby, grow a relationship with someone. You can also allow them to expire worthless.

I say that these tokens are in 15 minute increments because that is about the minimum amount of time needed to actually accomplish a small goal. So if you are awake let's say 17 hours a day, then you get about 68 tokens every day of your life. Let's say that I have about 40 years left to live if I am lucky. This is a total guess, as none of us actually knows.

This means I have about 992,800 tokens left in a best case scenario. I have already used a couple of them sitting down writing this today. By the time I finish writing this, I will have traded a few more as well.

Of course I'm not suggesting you count all your tokens up and start tallying them down every day. The point is that these tokens are limited, whether we think about them like this or not.

Deleting a few apps gave some of those tokens back to me, and yesterday I used them to reconnect with someone I hadn’t spoken to in almost five years. I can’t think of many better trades than that.

It has also made me think more about attention. There is an endless amount of information competing for ours every day, especially in markets. I could spend every one of those 68 daily tokens staring at charts, scrolling through X, and reading predictions about what a coin might do next. But that doesn’t necessarily make any of it a good use of my time.

When I do spend my tokens studying markets, I want to spend them understanding what is actually changing underneath the price.

And over the past week, QNT and HBAR have given us quite a lot worth understanding. Both have surged, but the price moves are only the surface. Underneath them, there have been some major developments that get directly into the kind of financial infrastructure I created The Layer Below to follow.

So let’s use a few of our tokens and dig into what actually happened.

QNT Just Had an Incredible Week

Now, let's go back to the kind of tokens we normally talk about here.

QNT has recently done something exceptional. It closed at about $66.85 on Sep 21, and then on Sep 27, it closed around $285, after trading above $350 for the day. That means QNT gained more than 300% in less than a week before today's very volatile trading.

A move like that is going to get attention. But the price is not actually the part of this story that interests me most.

On September 24, The Clearing House announced that it had selected Quant to power its new On-Chain Money Initiative. This will be a network that allows financial institutions to clear and settle tokenized bank deposits. Quant will provide the technology that helps coordinate those transactions and connect the new system to existing payment networks, including RTP and CHIPS.

If you aren't familiar with The Clearing House, this is not a small crypto company. Its payment networks clear and settle more than $2 trillion every day. The new tokenized deposit network is expected to become available to participating financial institutions during the first half of 2027.

A tokenized deposit is basically familiar bank money represented in a new digital form. It can still carry the protections of a normal bank deposit, but it can also be programmed to move when certain conditions are met. That opens the door to payments that settle automatically instead of waiting for people and separate systems to complete each step.

And that wasn't even the only major Quant announcement that day.

Real Money. Real Customers.

UK Finance announced that major British banks had completed the first live customer transactions using tokenized sterling deposits. Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander are involved, and the shared platform was developed by Quant.

The word that jumps out at me is live.

We've been hearing about blockchain pilots and proofs of concept for years. These transactions involved actual customers and real commercial bank money.

In one transaction, someone bought an item from another person. The money stayed locked in the buyer's account until the item was successfully exchanged. In two other transactions involving remortgages, money was locked and then released automatically when the deal was completed.

The types of things I've been talking about in my previous videos on QNT are beginning to move a little further away from "here is what this technology might someday do" and a little closer to "here is what people are actually doing with it."

There is an important warning here, though. Growing use of Quant's technology does not automatically tell us how much value will flow to the QNT token. Neither of these announcements says banks must buy QNT in proportion to the amount of money moving through these systems.

Those are two separate questions: How important is Quant becoming as financial infrastructure? And how much of that success ultimately creates demand or value for QNT itself?

After a price move this large, I think keeping those two questions separate is especially important.

HBAR Has Surged Too

QNT hasn't been alone. HBAR closed around 7.5 cents on Sep 17. As I write this today, it is trading around 12.17 cents, which is about 62% above where it was less than 2 weeks ago. It has surged today as well, so by the time you read this, it may be at a completely different price.

There has also been real news underneath the HBAR move.

The Hashgraph Group has built an identity platform called IDTrust, and it is now available through the IBM Cloud Catalog. IBM's own listing describes IDTrust as a platform for creating secure digital identities for AI agents, smart devices and people, and IBM's partner directory says the product is built on Hedera.

Why would an AI need an identity?

Imagine an AI agent that is allowed to interact with company systems, retrieve information, make purchases or carry out tasks on someone's behalf. Before another computer trusts it, there needs to be a way to answer some basic questions: Who is this agent? Who gave it permission to act? And can that permission be verified?

That is the type of problem IDTrust is trying to solve.

Hedera Is Also Going After the Bridge Problem

There was another Hedera development on September 24 that I think is especially interesting.

Hedera contributed CLPR, pronounced "clipper," to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as a new open-source lab. CLPR is being developed as a way for separate ledgers to communicate without depending on the traditional kind of blockchain bridge.

Think of today's blockchain world as a collection of islands. One network has its own assets and rules. Another network has its own. Moving something between those islands often requires a bridge sitting in the middle, and bridges have created some very large security problems over the years.

CLPR takes a different approach. It uses state proofs so separate ledgers can verify each other's state directly. The goal is to let data, messages and assets move between networks without putting a traditional bridge in the middle.

The project is still early. It has moved into the Linux Foundation's open development process so other developers and organizations can test it and help shape it.

Hashgraph's early-adopter program is focusing on three areas:

• cross-border payments and foreign exchange
• settlement across different ledgers
• moving collateral between systems

They sit right in the middle of the infrastructure question I have been interested in for years: What happens when all of these separate financial networks eventually have to work together?

Look Below the Price

Quant and Hedera are very different. The Quant news is tied to tokenized bank money and existing payment infrastructure. The Hedera news is touching areas like digital identity and communication between separate ledgers.

But there's a common thread here.

For much of crypto's history, crypto mostly lived inside the crypto world. Blockchains talked to crypto applications. Tokens moved through crypto exchanges and wallets. People spent years talking about what might happen when this technology eventually connected with banks, payment networks and large companies.

Now we are starting to see more pieces of those connections actually being built.

But price is only the surface. I want to know what is changing underneath it: who is building the infrastructure, who is actually using it, and whether these systems are moving from promises toward real use.

That is exactly why I called this newsletter The Layer Below.

One Last Thought

I want to go back to my friend for a moment, and expand on this idea with the tokens.

Four and a half years is a long time not to speak with someone who was once part of your life. Then suddenly you reconnect, start talking again, and realize just how much happened while the two of you were off living separate lives.

That conversation reminded me how easy it is to postpone things. I was telling my friend that if we keep catching up at this rate we probably only have about 8 or 9 conversations left (if we are lucky). Seriously think about someone in your life that you value that you may not see or speak to that often.

How many times have you spoken to them in the past year? What about the past 5 years or even 10 years. If you only see someone once per year and you at best have 40 years left, then you only have 40 visits left. If you only see someone once every 10 years, then at best you only have 4 visits left in the next 40 years.

Seriously think about this! We really don't have much time. We don't know how many tokens we were given. One of the first great books I ever read that helped me reframe the way I looked at life was this awesome book by Richard Carlson called Don't Sweat The Small Stuff for Men. I read this book so many times it literally started to fall apart.

I used to look at his blog and was very surprised to find that he had unexpectedly passed away on a plane flight about 20 years ago. There is a profound quote at the end of the book that I wanted to share with all of you. It is from a man named Stephen Levine, and Richard Carlson finished his book with it:

One More Thing

On a completely different note, I just created a Buy Me a Coffee page.

It gives anyone who enjoys A Stock Story and The Layer Below a simple way to help support the research, writing, visuals, and time that go into creating them.

Every bit of support helps me keep producing this work, keep improving it, and keep building the projects I’m excited to share with you.

And whether you support that way, watch a video, read The Layer Below, leave a comment, or share something I’ve made, I genuinely appreciate your support 😎👍

- Alex
A Stock Story