How Much Does It Cost to Tokenize an Asset?

By the Guardian team Updated November 2026 6 min read

Quick answer. There is no standard price. Stobox lists $3,500 to go onchain plus $245 a month; DigiShares, €5,000 plus €300 a month. INX’s SEC filing assumed $5M in offering expenses; Arbitrum’s audit program averaged $50,706 an audit.

Watch: How Much Does It Cost to Tokenize an Asset? 1:42

Video transcript

There is no standard price to tokenize an asset. A vendor's platform fee is only one line of the budget.

Issuers also pay counsel, a transfer agent, auditors and an operations team. Few publish prices, so we used pricing pages, SEC filings and public audit records.

Legal work decides what the token is. In SEC filings, Exodus estimated about 1.5 million dollars in offering expenses, and INX assumed 5 million dollars.

Platform fees come as setup plus subscription. Stobox lists 3,500 dollars plus 245 a month. DigiShares starts at 5,000 euros plus 300 a month.

Read what is left out. Stobox says counsel, audit, custody and filing fees are paid directly to those firms. Get every vendor's exclusions in writing.

Security is its own line. Eighteen audits in Arbitrum's program averaged 50,706 dollars, about 15 dollars a line. It is not a market rate.

The bill continues after launch. Budget for investor KYC, transfer agent fees, custody, round the clock monitoring and a new audit after every upgrade.

Guardian prices each engagement by scope. The Digital Asset Assurance Pilot lets institutions choose from architecture assessment, standards alignment, assurance engineering, smart contract audits and offchain pentests. Guardian is committing 5 million dollars to fund selected pilots.

Read the full article for every figure and its source, or talk to Guardian to price your security line before launch.

Ask a tokenization vendor what it costs and you get a platform price. That is one line of the budget.

An issuer also pays counsel, a transfer agent, auditors and the people who run the asset after launch. Few of them publish prices.

So we used figures anyone can check: published pricing pages, SEC filings and public audit price records. Where no public figure exists, we say what drives the cost.

The Cost Stack

Component	What it covers	Public figure, and whose
Legal and structuring	Structure, offering documents, filings	$1.5M (Exodus) and $5M (INX) estimated offering expenses
Platform	Issuance software, onboarding, cap table	Stobox: $245 a month; DigiShares: €5,000 plus €300 a month
Transfer agent	Official ownership record, corporate actions	No published rate card found
Smart contracts	Token contracts and deployment	Stobox: $1,550 to deploy, part of its $3,500 onchain fee
Security	Audit, pentests, monitoring	$50,706 average audit (Arbitrum program); $750 a day (Zcash grant)
Operations	KYC, custody, distributions, re-audits	DigiShares Launch: €2 per KYC check after the first 50

Each figure is one source’s own number, listed below. None is a market rate or a quote for your asset.

Legal and Structuring

Legal work decides what the token is: a share, a fund unit, a bond or a claim on a special purpose vehicle. Everything else is built around that choice.

Two SEC filings show the scale for a public token offering:

Exodus Movement, 2021. A Regulation A offering of up to $75M in Class A shares, each to be represented by a digital token. It estimated offering expenses, "primarily of legal and accounting fees", at about $1.5M.
INX Limited, 2020. An SEC-registered offering of up to 130 million INX Tokens at $0.90, a $117M maximum. It assumed $5M in offering expenses, with legal fees and expenses itemized at $3.76M.

We found no public legal budget for a private placement, a tokenized fund or a tokenized bond. What drives the legal line:

The structure: registered fund, private fund, special purpose vehicle or bond.
Every jurisdiction where you offer, list or hold the asset.
Whether the token is the legal ownership record or a mirror of one.
Transfer restrictions: who may hold it, and how the contract enforces that.
Regulator engagement, such as Hong Kong's SFC asking providers to show smart contract integrity.

Platform and Transfer Agent

The two platforms we found with published prices charge a setup fee and a monthly subscription:

Plan	One-time	Monthly	Notes
DigiShares Launch	€5,000	€300, two projects	Up to 200 users
DigiShares Standard (white-label)	€35,000	€950, two projects	Up to 2,000 users
DigiShares Advanced	From €50,000	€1,500	Up to 10,000 users
Stobox Compass	$3,500 to go onchain	$245, platform and one asset	Self-directed raise: $2,550 per 90-day window

Read what is left out. Stobox's page says: "Counsel, audit, custody and filing fees are paid direct to those firms."

DigiShares' page does not mention audit, legal or gas costs. It says final scope and third-party services "may vary".

Transfer agent

A transfer agent keeps the official record of who owns the security. Exodus named Securitize LLC as its transfer agent.

We found no transfer agent that publishes a rate card for tokenized securities. Ask how the fee scales with:

The number of investors, and how often they transfer.
Distributions, redemptions and other corporate actions.
How many chains the record spans.
Whether onboarding and KYC are bundled in.

Smart Contracts and Security

On a rented platform, deployment can be a line item. Stobox charges $1,550 and says mainnet "follows the contract audit".

Custom contracts, or changes to a platform's contracts, need their own review.

Audit

Arbitrum's average: 18 completed audits in its audit program reviewed 71,366 lines and averaged $50,706, about $15 a line.
Arbitrum's weekly range: the program's proposal says it is "not uncommon" for projects to pay $10,000 to $40,000 per auditor per week.
Disclosure: INX's SEC registration described Quantstamp's audit of the INX Token contract, and filed Quantstamp's consent.

For what named firms have charged, see what top auditors charge.

Pentest

Investor portals, admin consoles, APIs and signing services sit on the path to the asset. Public figures:

An approved 2026 Zcash grant budgets $750 a day for a security engineer.
Halborn told Lido DAO in 2023 that "an average infrastructure audit project costs approximately $50k".

Our guide to Web3 pentest cost covers how each scope is sized.

Monitoring

We found no published price for onchain monitoring of a tokenized asset.

The closest public budget we found is the same Zcash grant: $14,800 a month for pentesting, darknet monitoring and attack surface monitoring.

What drives the cost: the contracts and chains watched, detections written for your asset, and who responds, at what hours.

Ongoing Costs

Launch is not the end of the bill. Budget for:

KYC per investor: DigiShares Launch charges €2 per check after the first 50.
Transfer agent and fund administration, per investor and per event.
Custody of the underlying asset, and of the keys that control the token.
A new audit whenever contracts are upgraded or redeployed.
Monitoring and incident response, around the clock.
Chain fees, which Exodus's circular puts on the holder who transfers.

Some products cap what holders pay for all this. Ondo caps fund expenses on OUSG, its tokenized short-term Treasury fund, at 0.15% a year.

It has also waived OUSG's 0.15% management fee until January 1, 2027.

Three Routes, With Public Figures

We found no public all-in budget for a tokenized fund, bond or private credit deal. These are the published figures by route:

Route	Public figures, and whose	Still to add
Rent a platform	Stobox: $3,500 plus $245 a month; DigiShares: €5,000 plus €300 a month	Counsel, custody, filings, audit of any changes
SEC-filed public offering	Exodus: $1.5M (Regulation A); INX: $5M (registered) estimated expenses	Platform, transfer agent, operations, security
Custom contracts	Arbitrum program: $50,706 average audit; Zcash grant: $750 a day	Build, monitoring, re-audits after upgrades

Two quotes at the same price can buy very different coverage. Ask every vendor what its price excludes, in writing.

How Guardian Helps

Guardian does not publish prices. We quote each engagement from its scope.

For institutions, the Digital Asset Assurance Pilot is a low-commitment first engagement. You choose from five modules:

Architecture assessment
Standards alignment
Assurance engineering
Smart contract audit
Offchain pentests

Guardian is committing $5,000,000 to fund pilots for programs selected for their impact on digital asset adoption.

A Vanguard audit runs two independent teams, one powered by Helix, Guardian's AI auditor. It adds an invariant fuzzing suite, a $100,000 Guardian-funded contest and six months of update review.

Half of the package cost comes back as credits toward offchain assessments.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to tokenize an asset?

There is no standard price. Stobox lists $3,500 to go onchain plus $245 a month; DigiShares starts at €5,000 plus €300 a month. In SEC filings, Exodus and INX estimated $1.5M and $5M in offering expenses.

How much does a tokenization smart contract audit cost?

Few auditors publish prices. Arbitrum's audit program reports 18 completed audits averaging $50,706, about $15 per line of code. Its proposal called $10,000 to $40,000 per auditor per week "not uncommon". Those are Arbitrum's figures, not a market rate.

Do tokenization platform fees include legal and audit costs?

Often not. Stobox's pricing page says counsel, audit, custody and filing fees are paid directly to those firms. DigiShares' page does not mention audit, legal or gas costs. Ask each vendor for its exclusions in writing.

What costs continue after a tokenized asset launches?

KYC for new investors, transfer agent and fund administration, custody, chain fees, monitoring, and a new audit after every upgrade. Ondo, for one, caps OUSG's fund expenses at 0.15% a year.

Sources

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