Real World Assets token secondary market : a real(T) case analysis
Jean-Baptiste Pleynet
Nathaniel Pleynet
In Parts 1 and part 2 we mapped how YAM behaves during normal — “cruise-speed” — conditions. That calm broke on 3 July 2025, when a headline up-ended the order book.
The City of Detroit filed a high-profile nuisance-abatement lawsuit against more than 160 RealT-linked property LLCs, alleging widespread code violations. The filing capped months of critical press — unpaid-tax lists, tenant-complaint exposés — that had already dented confidence in RealT’s Detroit footprint.
The lawsuit triggered an immediate trust shock. Sellers flooded the market, and daily trade counts and volumes surged to multi-year highs.
Pressure intensified on 24 July, when a Wayne County judge issued a temporary restraining order barring RealT from collecting rent on the affected properties — cutting off the cash-flow that underpins token yields and sparking a second wave of stress.
Our aim is descriptive, not normative. We will not judge Detroit’s claims or RealT’s response. Instead we mine YAM order-book data to quantify how the shock unfolded and how price, volume, and liquidity adjusted.
The lawsuit did not merely rattle YAM — it blew the doors off. Both the number of executed trades and the dollar volume reached levels the marketplace had never recorded.
We can observe it in number of trades by simply prolongate the graph of the second article.
That naturally leads to an explosion of volumes:
This explosion is without comparison with the usual volatility, be being multi standard deviation higher than routine noise.
To put number around this, we can see that for a daily volume of around 20 k$ in June, it skyrocketed to more than 100 k$, and even more than 140 k$ on 10 days averages.
Did the market manage to digest the volume shock, or did prices buckle under the weight of panic selling?
The data say prices did move. The average executed yield climbed from 11.4 % in mid-June to 12.6 % by early August. Because yield and price move inversely, that 120-basis-point jump marks a clear decline in token valuations.
To see the scale, start with fundamentals. RealT’s theoretical net rent across all properties is about $15 m a year. Capitalised at an 11.4 % yield, the portfolio would be worth $131.5 m. Re-price that same rent stream at 12.6 % and the figure drops to $119 m — a latent paper loss of roughly $12 m.
This comparison makes even more sense that the time scale here is around 4 month, making effect of rent renegotiation neglectable, and all the yield change explainable by price change.
In short, soaring volume translated into lower prices, yet the slide was modest relative to the trading frenzy. Whether that counts as market fragility or surprising resilience is a question we leave to the reader.
One striking feature of the episode is that the surge in volume and yields wasn’t confined to Detroit. At first glance, you might expect only the properties directly hit by the city’s legal action to be dumped on YAM, but that’s not what the data show.
A plausible reading is that the episode shook confidence in RealT as a whole, prompting some holders to liquidate all RealT-linked assets — not just those in Detroit.
This pattern is visible in the volume-by-location data. Detroit, which has the largest share of RealT’s portfolio, naturally dominates, but other cities’ volumes rose in proportion to their pre-stress levels.
Average yields tell the same story: they rose across all locations, even in cities untouched by the lawsuit. In other words, there was no ‘flight to quality’ within the RealT ecosystem — stress spread evenly across the map.
Although this series concentrates on YAM, the secondary market, the July shock also rippled into RealToken Money Market (RMM) — RealT’s Aave-style lending pool where users post RealTokens as collateral and borrow stable-coins, chiefly USDC.
Under normal conditions, USDC borrow rates sit in the 10–13 % band. During the stress window they surged to about 20 %. That uptick most likely came from heightened demand for USDC, as traders pulled liquidity from RMM to purchase what they saw as bargain-priced tokens on YAM.
A full, data-driven dissection of RMM dynamics is outside the present scope, but the spike illustrates how tightly the lending and secondary-trading venues are intertwined.
Our aim throughout has been descriptive. We take no side in the Detroit litigation; we simply measure how a legal shock reverberated through YAM’s order book — and, by extension, through RMM.
Three facts stand out: (1) trade counts and dollar volume hit records, (2) average yields rose from 11.4 % to 12.6 %, erasing roughly $12 m in implied portfolio value, and (3) RMM’s USDC borrow rate jumped from the usual 10–13 % band to about 20 %.
Was that price drift surprisingly mild given a six-fold volume surge, or evidence of fragility? The data support either interpretation; what matters is that liquidity did not vanish — fresh (if costly) capital flowed in via RMM to meet the wave of sellers.
In Part 4 we return to “cruise-speed” conditions to examine time-to-execution — how long it takes for YAM offers to clear under normal liquidity — and in Part 5 we’ll explore how the market prices property revaluations. Stay tuned.
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.
