RWA Tokenization Cost Report — Q3 2026
The first edition. What the public pricing record for tokenizing real-world assets actually contains as of September 2026 — how much of it is vendor-authored, how far it contradicts itself, and where it is simply absent.
Last verified 3 September 2026 · 19 sources
This is a report about a market's information, not about the market. We collected every public cost figure we could find for tokenizing real-world assets, recorded each with its source, currency, cadence and date, and looked at what the record adds up to. The short version: it is smaller, more conflicted and more vendor-authored than the confident numbers in circulation suggest.
Finding 1 — the record is overwhelmingly self-interested
100 of 130 figures come from a source selling the service it is pricing. That is not an accusation; vendors are often the only party with any incentive to publish. But it means the public price of tokenization is, in aggregate, a marketing artefact that has been quoted secondhand until it hardened into something people repeat as fact.
The institutional reports that exist — from the IMF, EY and others — measure the savings tokenization is expected to deliver, not what an issuer spends to get there. We found no issuer publishing a completed project's actual costs. That absence is the single biggest gap in this market's evidence base.
Finding 2 — components contradict themselves, not each other
Spread is the highest published figure divided by the lowest, within one component and one currency.
| Component | Range (largest currency group) | Spread | Rows | Vendor-authored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| platform fee | $300–$3,000,000 | 10000× | 17 | 11/17 |
| smart contract dev | $1,248–$300,000 | 240× | 12 | 10/12 |
| marketing | $5,000–$1,000,000 | 200× | 2 | 2/2 |
| legal structuring | $5,000–$800,000 | 160× | 22 | 17/22 |
| audit | $2,000–$150,000 | 75× | 9 | 7/9 |
| ongoing compliance | $3,000–$200,000 | 67× | 15 | 12/15 |
| kyc per investor | $2–$100 | 50× | 3 | 1/3 |
| spv govt fee | $110–$4,000 | 36× | 2 | 2/2 |
| spv legal setup | $5,000–$75,000 | 15× | 8 | 6/8 |
| TOTAL | $50,000–$720,000 | 14× | 13 | 10/13 |
These are not competitive ranges. They are the same word covering different work: a classification memo and a full prospectus both filed as "legal structuring"; a USD 110 state filing fee and USD 25,000 of legal work both called "SPV formation"; a self-serve mint price and a bespoke build both called "smart contract development". The full mechanism is in why costs disagree by 10,000×.
Finding 3 — the sharpest contradictions
- Dubai VARA, year one — an order of magnitude apart
- An official fee schedule gives AED 40,000–100,000 on application. One advisory source gives USD 100,000–330,000 all-in. A third gives AED 2.1 million. The last most plausibly folds paid-up capital into "cost" without saying so — capital you must hold is not money you spend.
- MiCA CASP authorisation, year one — 4× apart, both defensible
- EUR 92,000–110,000 from one adviser against EUR 415,000–690,000 from another. The first counts documents and staffing; the second adds a full compliance-officer stack, ICT obligations and external audit. Neither is wrong. They are pricing different scopes of the same authorisation.
- A single vendor against itself, same quarter
- One provider publishes a cost index putting a USD 10M tokenised private fund at USD 25,000–90,000, and a playbook putting a USD 5–50M deal at "low-to-mid six figures inclusive of legal". Neither document flags the other.
Finding 4 — where the record is simply empty
Absence is a finding, and we publish it rather than filling it:
- Platform pricing. Several of the largest issuance platforms disclose no fees at all. The named-platform figures we hold came from third-party reviews, not vendor price lists.
- Law-firm pricing. Almost entirely quote-based. The specialist boutiques doing this work publish nothing.
- Reliance-grade legal opinions for tokenised real-estate and fund structures — the case most issuers actually have — have no reliable published price. See token legal opinions.
- Whole jurisdictions. We found no reliable public cost figures for Switzerland or DIFC. Figures quoted for neighbouring regimes circulate freely and are easy to mistake for them.
What changed this quarter
This is the first edition, so there is no prior period to compare. From Q4 2026 this section will record what moved: figures added, figures corrected, sources that went dead, and regimes whose published cost picture changed. Corrections are logged as they arrive on the changelog.
Method, in brief
A figure is recorded only if it appears in a public source with an attributable URL. Every row keeps its verbatim quote, currency, cadence and source date, and is tagged for whether the source sells what it prices. Figures are never averaged across sources, and ranges never mix currencies — averaging incompatible scopes produces a number that describes nothing. Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement rather than resolving it. Full rules, exclusions and our own commercial relationships are on the methodology page.
Use the data
The underlying dataset is downloadable and citable: CSV and JSON, version 2026-07-22, every row carrying its own source URL and date. If you cite a figure, carry its source and date with it — a number from this report without those is not a fact.
If you hold a published figure we missed, or one of ours is wrong or out of scope, tell us. Corrections are not conditional on any commercial relationship, and they are logged with their date.