The Complete Tokenization Process

Most tokenization guides stop at “deploy a token”. That is roughly a third of the work. This chapter walks the entire lifecycle — from verifying your entity, through structuring and deploying the asset, to servicing distributions, distributing to investors, and supporting a compliant secondary market. Nine phases. Every one of them is something you will actually do.

How to use this chapter. The interactive process explorer lets you step through the same nine phases with progress tracking. A branded PDF of this guide is available for download at the top of that page.

The nine phases at a glance

#	Phase	What it settles	Typical duration
01	Prepare	Entity verified, plan chosen	2–10 business days
02	Structure	Asset modelled, documents signed	1–3 weeks
03	Configure compliance	The rules every transfer must pass	Same day
04	Deploy	Contracts live on chain	2 business days (SLA)
05	Onboard investors	Verified investors, whitelisted wallets	Minutes to 2 days each
06	Raise	Capital in, tokens allocated	Offering window
07	Service	Distributions, corporate actions, controls	Ongoing
08	Distribute	Investors found and qualified	Ongoing
09	Secondary	Transferable, still compliant	Post-issuance

Phase 01 — Prepare

You start with a normal account and apply to become an issuer. Know Your Business verification runs through SumSub’s business flow, and fifteen entity types are supported — Individual, Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Corporation, LLC, Non-Profit, Government Entity, Trust, Joint Venture, Association, Cooperative, Publicly Traded Company, Private Company, Educational Institution and Foundation. The document set varies by entity type and jurisdiction, but generally: certificate of incorporation or formation, articles of association or operating agreement, tax registration, beneficial-owner ID and KYC for any owner at 25% or above, director and officer ID, a bank reference letter, and a source-of-funds declaration. SumSub processes the submission and routes the result to Libertum admin for final approval. Choosing a plan. Pay-per-listing suits infrequent or bespoke deals. Monthly plans become cheaper from roughly six offerings a year. Your plan sets offering count, team seats and module access.

Phase 02 — Structure

The Tokenization Wizard is asset-class-aware: the steps you see depend on the class you pick.

Asset class	Wizard steps
Real Estate	4
Debt Digital Asset	8
Invoice Factoring	9
Revenue Digitisation	9
Bonding Token	9
Equity Digital Asset	10
Commodity Tokenization	10
Overview captures offering name, token name, symbol, decimals, asset location, cover image, company logo and description. Project details are class-specific — real estate takes property type, full address, valuation and occupancy; equity takes company structure, business model and key metrics; debt takes instrument type, seniority, security and covenants.
Tokenization structure sets total supply, token price, minimum and maximum ticket, total raise target, allocation and vesting. Four fields deserve care because changing them later means redeployment:

• Decimals — almost always 18 for ERC-3643 and ERC-20.
• Total supply — the maximum you will ever issue; enforced on-chain by the Supply Limit module.
• Token price — quoted in USD, stored internally at stablecoin precision.
• Min / max ticket — minimum is enforced at order creation; maximum should mirror your Max Balance module. Documents follow a class-driven checklist splitting mandatory from recommended. E-signature is mandatory for real estate and equity offerings. Anything requiring signature wires through DocuSign. Distribution settings cover issuance start and end dates, marketplace visibility, featured placement and a bulk-CSV investor invite list. Dividend and governance settings cover distribution frequency and mechanism, voting rights, quorum threshold and proposal cool-down.

Phase 03 — Configure compliance

Choosing a standard

Standard	Use when
ERC-3643 (T-REX)	Security tokens needing on-chain compliance enforcement. The default for most security-token offerings.
ERC-20	Utility or governance tokens. Lighter and cheaper, but no built-in identity or claim verification.
ERC-721	One-of-one or limited-edition tokenization.
CIP-113	Compliance-native tokenization on Cardano. Currently Preview testnet only — pending mainnet audit.
CIP-20	Fungible Cardano native token without programmable compliance. Live on Cardano mainnet today.

Composing the ruleset

Each compliance module is an independently deployed contract. The Modular Compliance controller chains them together, so a transfer must pass every enabled check.

Module	What it enforces
Country Allow	Transfers only to wallets whose verified identity carries an allow-listed country claim.
Country Restrict	Blocks transfers to wallets in a blocklist — commonly the US for non-Reg-D offerings, plus sanctioned jurisdictions.
Supply Limit	A hard cap on total supply.
Max Balance	No single wallet may hold more than X tokens — used for accreditation caps.
Hold Time	Blocks transfer within N seconds of mint — commonly 365 days for Reg D / Reg S restrictions.
Modules compose freely. A US Reg D offering might enable Country Allow (US only), Max Balance and Hold Time at one year. A Reg S offering instead excludes the US via Country Restrict.

Mint timing

Available for ERC-20 and ERC-3643 only.

• On-order (default) — tokens mint as each investor’s primary order settles. The common choice for fundraises.
• On-deploy — full supply mints to a custodian wallet at deployment, then transfers to investors as orders settle. Choose this when secondary liquidity matters from day one.

Agents and owners

An Agent is a wallet permitted to mint, burn, pause, freeze, force-transfer and recover. Routine operations — minting at order settlement, dividend distribution — are typically delegated to Libertum’s relayer while you retain owner powers. Functional roles are TENANT, RENT, STABLECOIN, YIELD and BUYBACK. Only the Owner can change compliance modules, change the identity registry or transfer ownership. Owner is therefore usually a hardware wallet or multi-sig; agents are operational wallets that automate day-to-day functions.

Phase 04 — Deploy

Submitting the completed wizard moves the offering to PENDING_ADMIN_APPROVAL. Libertum admins verify that KYB is current and approved, mandatory documents are present, token economics are internally consistent, compliance configuration matches the stated jurisdictions, no restricted-country whitelist conflicts exist, and the offering description makes no claims that would constitute investment advice. SLA target is 2 business days for clean submissions. On approval, the TREXFactory deploys all six core contracts — Token, Identity Registry, Identity Registry Storage, Trusted Issuers Registry, Claim Topics Registry and Modular Compliance — plus your selected compliance modules, in a single transaction.

Phase 05 — Onboard investors

Investors complete identity verification before they can subscribe. Those verified identity claims are exactly what the on-chain compliance modules read when validating a transfer later. Wallets reach your whitelist three ways:

1. Investor-initiated — the investor connects a wallet on the offering page; the platform submits a whitelist request to your Transfer Agent.
2. Issuer manual entry — add the address in Issuer Dashboard → Wallet Whitelist and link it to the investor’s identity record.
3. CSV bulk upload — a file with wallet, email, country columns, used to migrate an existing investor list.

Phase 06 — Raise

Primary-market orders each carry a status and a complete payment trail with on-chain references. Minimum ticket is enforced at order creation; maximum ticket should mirror your Max Balance module so the two never disagree. As orders settle, tokens are minted (on-order) or transferred from the custodian wallet (on-deploy). The investor’s balance and your cap table update together. For fiat payouts, Stripe Connect splits each payment automatically: Stripe takes its processing fee, Libertum takes a configurable platform fee in basis points, and you receive the net.

Phase 07 — Service

This is where most of the lifecycle actually happens. Cap table — a real-time holder table with wallet, investor name, country, current holdings, cost basis and last transaction, filterable by country, holding range and recent activity, exportable to CSV. The Transfer Journal is an immutable chronological ledger mirroring on-chain events. Dividends and distributions run in four steps: you declare an amount, currency (typically USDC or USDT), allocation method and scheduled date; the platform snapshots holders and computes pro-rata allocation across MINTED orders, writing one record per investor; on the scheduled date the relayer, acting as STABLECOIN agent, transfers stablecoin to each wallet; each successful row is marked distributed and the investor is emailed. Individual failures — a blacklisted wallet, say — are logged and surfaced in the dashboard, and you can retry, refund off-chain, or hold pending compliance resolution. Controls. Full freeze prevents a wallet sending or receiving; partial freeze locks a specific quantity. Forced transfer moves tokens bypassing the sender’s frozen status but still subject to receiver verification. Recovery atomically transfers all tokens from a lost wallet to a new one and re-links the new wallet to the same identity. All three are Transfer-Agent-initiated by default, and your policy can require dual control. Documents and communications. A versioned per-offering document vault, with investor-visible documents tagged and some requiring DocuSign signature. Announcements reach all holders or a segment by email and in-app, using corporate action, distribution announcement, governance proposal or general update templates.

Phase 08 — Distribute

Issuing a compliant token does not, by itself, find you investors. This phase is the one most tokenization stacks leave entirely to the issuer. Distribution Hub is an AI-powered investor CRM and matching engine that discovers, qualifies and connects issuers with investors suited to a specific offering. Libby AI is the conversational co-pilot inside it. Ask in plain language and it discovers, scores and pipelines investors and drafts outreach — with the issuer deciding what actually goes out. Whitelabel Shopfront is a single-offering branded landing page: configure logo, colours, hero image and custom CSS, write your own headline, value props and FAQ, then publish to your-tenant.libertum.market or your own domain via CNAME. Investors see only that offering — no marketplace, no other listings, no Libertum branding. Whitelabel Platform is a full investor and issuer marketplace under your own brand and domain. Choose whether it shows only your offerings or also Libertum-shared offerings, optionally supply tenant-specific KYC provider keys, and optionally enable a tenant admin role.

Phase 09 — Secondary

Because the ruleset lives in the token’s own compliance modules rather than in a venue’s database, a transfer is validated against the same conditions wherever it is initiated. Two whitelisted investors can transfer peer-to-peer; every transfer must pass all enabled modules — jurisdiction, balance cap, hold time — and the Transfer Journal reflects it immediately. Where redemption is enabled, buyback and redemption requests are managed through the Redemption Orders tab alongside primary orders.

What to read next

• Issuer Guide — the same process at maximum operational detail, including the Issuer Dashboard tab by tab.
• Token Standards & Smart Contracts — the contract architecture behind phases 03 and 04.
• Compliance Enforcement — how transfer validation actually executes.
• Plans, Modules & Pricing — what phase 01 commits you to.