Real World Assets token secondary market : a real(T) case analysis
Jean-Baptiste Pleynet
Nathaniel Pleynet
What and why
We’re two amateur economists who found ourselves poking around RealT’s secondary marketplace, YAM, simply because we wondered how prices form when real‑estate deeds become blockchain tokens. One spreadsheet led to another, and before long we had a full dataset of every executed trade from 1 Jan 2024 to 30 Jun 2025.
At first the exercise was purely for us — call it academic curiosity mixed with investor instinct. But as the charts piled up, we figured others might have the same questions:
Are YAM prices efficient, or is there room for arbitrage?
Do RealTokens track the economics of traditional real estate, or do they follow crypto‑style rules of their own?
Which factors — rent, location, liquidity — actually move this market?
This article launches a weekly series where we share what the data says, one topic at a time. Over the next few months we’ll cover price discovery, yields, liquidity shocks and the July 2025 stress event, among other. The goal is a transparent record of findings and, eventually, a more formal paper.
Independence note: RealT doesn’t sponsor or vet our analysis. We send them a pre‑publication draft only to catch factual errors; everything else is on us. See disclaimer part.
Realt and YAM
RealT is a company that uses the gnosis blockchain to facilitate real estate investment by transforming physical properties into digital tokens called RealTokens. Each RealToken represents a fractional ownership of a property held by RealT. When an investor purchases a token, the transaction is immutably recorded on the blockchain. Each token is tied to a specific property. YAM (“You And Me”) is the peer-to-peer secondary marketplace created by RealT on Gnosis Chain, where investors can freely buy, sell, or swap their RealTokens at any time without going through an intermediary. The decentralized application operates with a whitelisting system: only pre-authorized addresses for each property can post or accept offers, which are settled in stablecoins such as USDC or wXDAI through low-fee smart contracts. Since its launch, YAM has already recorded more than $4.5 million in trading volume and now concentrates the bulk of the secondary liquidity within the RealT ecosystem.
Data presentation
In this article, we share a few key indicators that provide an initial overview of the RealT secondary market. In future articles, we will have the opportunity to dive deeper into some of these indicators to better understand the underlying dynamics.
For now, we have chosen to focus exclusively on executed trades, that is, transactions where supply and demand have actually met. We are deliberately excluding open or pending offers, which may offer some insights but do not necessarily reflect the true state of the market.
Our analysis is based on historical data starting from January 1st, 2024 to 30th June 2025. While it is technically possible to look further back, we believe doing so would not significantly improve the quality of the results. The market in its earlier stages was likely quite different from what it is today, given its innovative and constantly evolving nature.
Therefore, we consider it more relevant to focus on a recent period that more accurately reflects the market’s current behavior.
Also, we are aware of significantly important events happening during the month of July 2025, that resulted to a stress on YAM market. We will dedicate a future article specifically to this period and the learnings we get from this. But as this correspond to an unusual period, we will exclude it for now from the study of a “cruse speed” market.
Analyzing Historical Token Prices on the Secondary Market
The simplest starting point in analyzing the RealT secondary market is to examine the historical trades and the token prices at the time of each transaction.
When doing so, we clearly observe that most trades cluster around the $50 mark, while a smaller number occur around $100 or $200. This trend aligns logically with RealT’s issuance strategy: most tokens are initially sold at prices around $50, which naturally leads to a concentration of secondary market activity around that same price range. There are, however, exceptions. Some tokens were initially distributed at higher prices, typically around $100 or $200, depending on the underlying property’s value and rental performance (see for example https://realt.co/product/16200-fullerton-ave-detroit-mi-48227/). These tokens continue to trade around their original price ranges on the secondary market.
While analyzing token prices provides a useful entry point, it has limited relevance when evaluating the attractiveness of an investment. This is because the price alone does not reflect the expected returns or rental income generated by the property.
In upcoming articles, we will shift focus to what truly matters: token yield. Yield offers a far more accurate picture of an asset’s profitability, and we will explore how it behaves across different properties and over time.
Volume
If we look at the volume of trade per day, the market is quite active, with average round 25 000 USD exchanges per day.
This information is better represented by the mobile average of volume over multiple days, represented by the following graph :
Details on stables coin
On the blockchain, it’s not currently possible to transact directly in fiat currency (such as USD). Instead, we use proxies known as stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that are typically pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio. Several stablecoins are accepted on the RealT platform, with USDC and DAI being the most commonly used. Here is the 10 days mobile average volume per stablecoin.
As expected, USDC — the primary currency used on RealT — is by far the most dominant in the market. It is followed by WXDAI, which also sees a significant amount of activity.
Conclusion
In summary, this first exploration of the RealT secondary market lays the foundation for more in-depth analysis to come. The data reviewed reveals a generally liquid market, with trading activity concentrated around initial token price levels and stable yields despite fluctuations in volume. This supports the value of an infrastructure like YAM, which has proven to be both used and useful, as some users have already pointed out.
Next week, we will take a deeper look into one of the most critical aspects of tokenized real estate investing: the quoted yield on the market.
Disclaimer
We strive to ensure that our work remains objective and grounded in data. In the interest of full transparency, we disclose that we hold investments in RealT assets and, more broadly, recognize the company’s approach as a noteworthy and innovative contribution to the real world asset sector.
Preliminary results are shared with the RealT team one week prior to publication, solely for the purpose of identifying potential bugs or inaccuracies in the data presented. The RealT team does not participate in the analysis, nor do they influence the methodology or conclusions in any way.
This study is conducted independently and is entirely self-funded.
This research draws partly on the free, open-source analytics suite maintained by the RealToken Community.