Clarifying the production setup for Registry Utility and CIP-56

Hi everyone,

I’m planning a production application using the existing Registry Utility and CIP-0056 token standard, without writing custom Daml contracts.

I’ve gone through the documentation, but I still have a few questions about the actual production setup:

1. For an application provider, is running our own Canton participant required, or can we use the hosted Registry Utility and Token Standard APIs without operating a participant ourselves?

2. For CIP-0056 token integration, what is the recommended setup between the Registry Utility APIs, Token Standard APIs, and our own participant? I want to make sure we are using each layer as intended.

3. The documentation mentions that the instrument admin needs an AllocationFactory and TransferRule. Is there a supported API to create these programmatically, or does this currently need to be done through the Utility UI?

4. For production, what is the recommended way to pin and manage compatible versions of the Registry Utility, token-standard DARs, and Canton/Splice? Is there an official compatibility matrix or recommended release combination?

5. When integrating the token-standard contracts, should application developers depend directly on the published token-standard interfaces/DARs, or should we treat the Registry Utility APIs as the main abstraction and avoid depending on the underlying implementation?

I’d appreciate guidance on the recommended production approach, especially from anyone who has implemented this outside of the example/local environments.

Thanks!