● RWA tokenization is a five-layer stack, not a single product category. You need to know which layer you are shopping in before you compare vendors.● Tokenization platforms (Securitize, DigiShares) sell productized issuance and management software you configure.● Blockchain infrastructure and middleware (Kaleido) connects institutions to multiple chains through node management and APIs.● Asset-class-specific infrastructure (Centrifuge for private credit, Ondo Finance for treasuries) services one asset class end to end.● Compliance and identity infrastructure (Tokeny, ERC-3643) embeds verification and transfer rules at the smart-contract level.● Development and implementation partners (Restart Fintech) build and wire the other layers together. RestartBanking sits here only. It is not a platform, network, custodian, or standards body.

Why the RWA tokenization stack has layers, not a single winner

No single vendor covers issuance, infrastructure, asset-class servicing, compliance, and custom build at once, because each layer solves a different technical problem with different economics. A tokenization platform optimizes for repeatable cap-table and onboarding workflows across many issuers. A compliance standard optimizes for identity logic that regulators can audit. A custody provider optimizes for key security. These goals pull vendors toward specialization, and a firm that tried to own all five would build shallow tools in every one.

Tokeny's own RWA tokenization ecosystem map sets the precedent for organizing this industry by function rather than rank. Tokeny sorts vendors into six named categories including tokenization platforms, blockchain networks, DeFi players, custodians, and data companies, and treats the map as a living document it updates as the market grows. The map's value comes from placement, not scoring. A reader learns where Securitize, Centrifuge, or Fireblocks operates, not which one is best, because "best" only means something inside a single layer.

That framing changes how you read the rest of this page. Rather than a ranked shortlist, treat each layer below as a category you either need or do not, depending on your asset class, your jurisdictions, and whether you have an engineering team. A buyer issuing a standard tokenized fund on one chain may need only a platform. A trust company launching private credit across MiCA and Swiss jurisdictions needs several layers assembled together. Later sections walk through a representative deployment to show how a development partner integrates a compliance layer, a custody provider, and a chosen chain into one working system.

Tokenization platforms: productized issuance and management

Tokenization platforms sell packaged software that issues and administers tokenized securities without requiring you to build the underlying tooling. A platform in this layer handles the cap table, investor onboarding, and the secondary transfer workflows that move tokens between verified holders. You configure the product to your fund structure and jurisdiction rather than commissioning custom smart contracts. Securitize and DigiShares both operate here, offering productized issuance and lifecycle management as their core commercial product.

A caveat about the evidence matters before you compare the two. The public sources available for this map do not contain verified product documentation, pricing, feature breakdowns, or tokenized AUM figures for either Securitize or DigiShares. DigiShares is confirmed as an active tokenization company led by CEO and co-founder Claus Skaaning, participating in industry panels such as the Tokenization in the U.S. webinar alongside firms like Aptos Lab and MetroSpaces. Beyond company confirmation and market presence, the sourced material supports no specific claims about either vendor's client roster or scale, and this page will not invent them.

One structural decision affects every platform in this layer, so you should evaluate it per vendor. The SEC's 2026 guidance treats tokenized securities under the same rules as traditional ones, judged by economic substance rather than the recording technology, and it separates three token models. An issuer-sponsored token writes the on-chain record directly, a custodial token relies on a third-party intermediary holding the underlying security, and a synthetic token gives derivative-like exposure without direct ownership, per State Street's Digital Digest. Which model a platform uses determines your compliance posture, so ask before you commit.

Choose this layer when your needs are standard and you want packaged software you configure rather than infrastructure built to your specification. If your requirements are custom, cross-jurisdictional, or tied to a single asset class, a platform alone will not cover them, and the later layers become relevant.

Blockchain infrastructure and middleware: connecting institutions to chains

Below the issuance platforms sits a layer that most buyers never see directly. Blockchain infrastructure and middleware handles node management, multi-chain orchestration, and API connectivity, the operational plumbing that lets an institution talk to a chain without running the machinery itself. Kaleido occupies this layer, and it does not sell a tokenization product at all. It sells the connectivity that a tokenization product runs on.
Kaleido frames its own value around what surrounds the smart contract, not the contract itself. In its words, developers "spend months managing transaction queues, node connectivity, and event indexing instead of building product features," and Kaleido's suite of "500+ APIs" automates that work across the smart contract lifecycle and multi-chain orchestration. A third-party benchmarking summary confirms broad protocol coverage across Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Hyperledger Fabric, Quorum, Besu, and Corda, and scores Kaleido 4.8 out of 5 on interoperability and integration, the highest of any category on that page.
The same benchmarking notes where this layer stops. Kaleido's public materials do not name tokenization standards such as ERC-3643 or ERC-1400, and secondary market liquidity scores only 3.1 out of 5, with no surfaced exchange or ATS partnerships. A vendor at this layer gives you the rails, not the issuance workflow, the investor onboarding, or the transfer-restriction logic.
Treat Kaleido's operational claims with the caution the sources themselves apply. Its stated "99.99% uptime" over four years is vendor-reported, and the rfp.wiki analysis found no independent uptime monitoring source to verify it. The named enterprise clients, deal sizes, and pricing tiers are also absent from public materials, so evaluate this layer on documented protocol coverage rather than on the operational headline numbers.

Asset-class-specific infrastructure: private credit and treasuries

Some vendors do not sell general-purpose issuance software at all. They build their entire stack around servicing one asset class end to end, from onboarding to yield distribution to secondary distribution. Centrifuge and Ondo Finance are the clearest examples, and their product scope tells you why they belong in a separate layer from platforms like Securitize.

Ondo Finance operates as a fund manager for tokenized U.S. Treasuries and cash management, not as a venue where you issue arbitrary assets. It runs its own fund family through OUSG and USDY, holding roughly $2.75 billion combined as of May 2026, split across about $625 million in OUSG and $2.1 billion in USDY (Eco). The two products serve different buyers. OUSG requires accredited or qualified purchaser status and reads as the institutional Treasury cash product, while USDY opens to non-U.S. individuals after a 40-day lockup and functions as a retail yield token. Ondo distributes each product across many chains rather than confining it to one, with OUSG live on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Aptos, and Sui.

Centrifuge occupies the same layer but specializes in private credit. It runs the longest-standing tokenized private credit marketplace, holding roughly $430 million in active pools as of May 2026, covering trade finance, consumer credit, and real-world receivables (Eco). Centrifuge acts as marketplace infrastructure rather than a balance-sheet lender, so pool risk depends on the originator and the underlying receivables, not on Centrifuge itself. That distinction matters for buyers underwriting credit, because you are evaluating each pool's originator, not the platform's credit.

Both vendors reveal how the asset-class layer plugs into the rest of the stack through custody. Ondo, along with Securitize and Hashnote, relies on traditional custodians like BNY Mellon and State Street for the underlying assets, which pushes credit risk back into the regulated financial system (Eco). A tokenized Treasury product is a wrapper. The custody, the fund administration, and the compliance checks still come from named institutions underneath. That reliance pattern is exactly why these specialists sit alongside, rather than replace, the platform and custody layers.

Compliance and identity infrastructure: the standards layer

Compliance for tokenized securities lives inside the token contract itself, not in a database beside it. Securities law requires an issuer to know who holds an asset and to block transfers to ineligible parties. A standard ERC-20 token cannot do this, because it moves freely to any wallet. Tokeny built the T-REX standard, later ratified as ERC-3643, to embed those rules directly in the transfer logic.

The mechanism explains why this work forms its own layer. Before any ERC-3643 token moves, the contract runs two checks. The isVerified() function confirms the receiving wallet carries the right claims, such as a completed KYC check signed by a trusted claim issuer. The canTransfer() function then tests the trade against global rules like investor caps and jurisdictional limits. A transfer that fails either check reverts on-chain, so an ineligible holder can never receive the asset in the first place.

Identity itself runs through ONCHAINID, a framework that links each investor's wallet to a separate identity contract holding cryptographic claims. The Identity Registry stores the wallet address, the linked identity contract, and an ISO country code, and the token consults it on every transfer. That design lets compliance run even on permissionless blockchains without publishing anyone's personal data on-chain. The check confirms eligibility without exposing the details behind it.

Bolting this onto an issuance platform would break the guarantee. If eligibility lived in a platform's off-chain records, a token could still move on-chain without consulting them, and the issuer would lose the enforcement that securities law demands. Putting the checks in the contract makes the rule inseparable from the asset.

ERC-3643 is a standard, not a product, and its governance reflects that. The ERC3643 Association, legally an ASBL registered in Luxembourg, maintains the open-source protocol as regulation and technology shift. It is the only tokenized-securities standard formally accepted as an ERC, and it currently underpins more than $32 billion in tokenized assets. Buyers should read Tokeny as a compliance-infrastructure vendor and steward of a shared standard, distinct from the platforms that build on top of it.

Development and implementation partners: Restart Fintech

The four layers above only produce a working system when someone integrates them, and that integration work is its own layer. A tokenization platform, a middleware provider, a custody service, and a compliance standard each solve part of the problem, but none of them wires the pieces together for a specific institution. Development and implementation partners do that connecting work. Restart Fintech operates in this layer and only this layer.
Restart Fintech functions as a fractional CTO and custom-build partner for institutions that need tokenization infrastructure but do not want to hire and manage a full in-house blockchain team. The work covers custom smart contract development, KYC and AML integration into the token flow, custody integration with the institution's chosen provider, and regulatory compliance coverage across multiple jurisdictions, including MiCA in the EU, the Swiss DLT Act, and SEC considerations in the US. An asset manager launching a tokenized fund gets a team that designs the contracts, connects the compliance checks, and integrates the custodian, rather than a shelf product to configure alone.
The distinction matters because Restart Fintech does not occupy the other layers, and claiming otherwise would misrepresent the map. RestartBanking is not a blockchain network like the chains Kaleido connects to. It is not a custodian holding client assets. It is not a standards body, so it does not govern or maintain a token standard the way the ERC3643 Association maintains ERC-3643. Instead, Restart Fintech implements against those layers. It might deploy contracts on a chain the institution selects, embed the identity and transfer-restriction logic that a standard like ERC-3643 defines, and connect to whatever custodian and compliance vendors the deployment requires.
The buyer for this layer is an institution with a specific mandate and no blockchain engineering bench. Asset managers, trust companies, and banks fall into this group when they need infrastructure tailored to their asset class, their custody relationships, and their regulatory footprint. A trust company serving clients across the EU and Switzerland cannot buy a single packaged platform and assume it satisfies both MiCA and the Swiss DLT Act. A development partner assembles and integrates the right components for that exact situation, which is the value this layer provides that no productized platform can replicate on its own.

How the layers combine in a real institutional deployment

Consider an asset manager launching a tokenized private credit fund for non-U.S. institutional investors. No single vendor delivers the whole thing, and the layers slot together in a specific order.

A development partner like RestartBanking starts by writing the token contract against ERC-3643, so every transfer runs the isVerified() and canTransfer() checks before it executes. That contract needs a live compliance backbone, so the partner wires in ONCHAINID identity claims and connects a KYC/AML provider to sign those claims for eligible investors. The token now enforces investor caps and jurisdictional limits at the smart-contract level rather than through off-chain paperwork.

Next, the underlying credit still lives with a traditional custodian, the pattern Ondo and Centrifuge both follow when they route custody through regulated banks. The development partner integrates that custody relationship so the on-chain token maps to real off-chain collateral. Finally, the partner selects a blockchain and middleware layer. If the fund needs to distribute across Ethereum and a Substrate chain like Centrifuge's, a middleware provider such as Kaleido handles node connectivity, event indexing, and multi-chain orchestration underneath the whole arrangement.

The decision rule follows from that sequence. Buy a single platform when your requirements are standard and packaged. If you are issuing a plain-vanilla security in one jurisdiction with a common investor profile, a productized issuance vendor already covers the workflow, and assembling separate vendors adds cost for no benefit.

Assemble a multi-vendor combination through an implementation partner when your requirements are custom, cross-jurisdictional, or asset-class-specific. A fund spanning MiCA, the Swiss DLT Act, and SEC considerations, or one servicing an asset class no packaged platform models cleanly, needs the layers wired together by hand.

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