Quant (QNT) has one of the steepest moves of the year behind it. On September 21, 2026 the token cost around 64 US dollars; on September 27 it reached an intraday high of 373 US dollars on th
Quant (QNT) has one of the steepest moves of the year behind it. On September 21, 2026 the token cost around 64 US dollars; on September 27 it reached an intraday high of 373 US dollars on the Binance spot exchange, almost six times as much in six days. On Wednesday evening, September 30, QNT trades at around 292 US dollars (Binance, 18:20 UTC). Many readers are therefore asking right now how Quant can be shorted, meaning how to bet on a decline. This article sets out the routes, the costs and the risk that is most often underestimated.
We explained the trigger for the run in the background piece on the selection by The Clearing House; the technical picture is in the Quant price prediction and in the analysis Is Quant a good buy at the current price?. This piece is about the other side.
The path up was anything but even. After the high of September 27, QNT fell the following day to 195 US dollars, a drop of almost 48 percent within a day. Since then the price has recovered and reached an intraday high of 329 US dollars on September 30. Between the daily low and the daily high there were around 25 percent on that Wednesday alone.
A price that multiplies within a week looks overstretched, and the idea of betting on a return suggests itself. That is precisely the idea a great many market participants are having at the same time. This is the point at which a short can become expensive, and more on that shortly.
The usual route is open-ended futures contracts, known as perpetual futures. On September 30 we checked the exchanges' public interfaces for where a QNT contract is listed. The result: Binance (USDT futures), Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Kraken Futures, MEXC and BingX each run a perpetual on Quant. At Binance, positions worth around 53 million US dollars were open in these contracts, at Bybit around 30 million. Bybit permits leverage of up to 75 times.
A second route is the margin short on a spot exchange: you borrow QNT, sell it and buy it back later. Kraken offers this for the QNT/USD pair with two or three times leverage, but not for QNT/EUR. On the Coinbase spot exchange, Quant is listed only for buying and selling; a short is not possible there. On the decentralised derivatives exchange Hyperliquid there is currently no QNT market.
Anyone who already owns QNT and wants to lock in gains often needs no short at all. A partial sale is the simplest and cheapest way to reduce risk. Hedging via a future is more worthwhile for larger holdings that are not to be sold for tax or other reasons.
Important before opening an account: in the EU, crypto derivatives do not fall under the crypto regulation MiCA but under the securities rules of MiFID II. Whether a provider enables futures for customers resident in Germany is its own decision, and one it changes occasionally. That is set out in the terms of use and should be checked before the first deposit. Which providers operate in the EU with a licence is shown by our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
For customers resident in Germany the list becomes considerably shorter. In the EU, OKX offers its own futures regulated under MiFID II, the so-called X-Perps with leverage of up to ten times. Quant is not among them on September 30: QNT is missing from the 242 contracts OKX runs for the European market. The OKX QNT contract mentioned above is aimed at customers outside the EU. Bitpanda offers short positions only in the older CFD product Bitpanda Leverage, according to its help page for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other large coins; we did not find a short on Quant there, and Bitpanda describes its newer margin trading only for long positions. Bitget is currently not accepting new customers in the EU. Anyone wanting to short QNT from Germany therefore ends up above all with the margin short via the QNT/USD pair at Kraken, provided the account is enabled for margin trading.
Short positions are currently paying the buyers on an ongoing basis.
With perpetual futures, buyers and sellers settle up every eight hours via what is called the funding rate. If it is negative, the shorts pay the longs. That is exactly the case with Quant at present: on the evening of September 30, Binance reported minus 0.092 percent per eight hours and Bybit minus 0.056 percent. At Binance that works out at around 0.28 percent over a day. A short position of 1,000 US dollars therefore pays around 2.80 US dollars a day to the other side without the price having moved at all.
The rate changes with every period and can quickly turn out higher or lower. What it does show is how the market is positioned: there is more pressure from the selling side than from the buying side.
A negative funding rate with a rising price is a delicate mixture. Many shorts mean many positions that will be closed by force on a further advance. Each of those closures is a purchase and drives the price further, which triggers the next shorts. How such a chain runs was shown most recently by the short squeeze in Ethereum in September.
Many shorts in a rising market are stored energy.
On leverage, a simple calculation pays off. With five times leverage the collateral posted is used up on a rise of 20 percent, with ten times already at 10 percent, and the exchange usually closes the position somewhat earlier still. With Quant the price swung by around 25 percent between the daily low and the daily high on September 30 alone. Anyone who had gone short at the daily low with five times leverage would have lost the position on the way up, even though the price stood lower again in the evening.
Behind the advance there is not mere sentiment but a mandate from the US banking sector with a date attached: the network for tokenised deposits is to be available to the participating institutions in the first half of 2027. Anyone betting against Quant is therefore betting against a story that can keep delivering news for months. That does not argue against a setback, but it does argue against the assumption that it has to come immediately.
Three questions help with placing this: how high is the funding rate, and what does it cost to hold the position open for a week? At what price will the position be closed, and does that level lie within the usual daily swing? And how much of your own capital may this one trade cost? How leverage, entry and liquidation feel can be practised beforehand without real money, for instance in a trading demo account.
Leveraged derivatives are risky, and a total loss of the capital deployed is possible. This article describes routes and costs; it is not a recommendation to buy or sell Quant.
