Breaking Records via Tokenization, Round 2

RealT has created the world’s fastest purchase-to-transfer system of property ownership.

5 min readJan 23, 2020

Back in October, we published a blog that illustrated the strengths of the RealT platform — specifically, the benefits that Ethereum-based tokenization has enabled. This article is an update about that system that illustrates some of the behind-the-scenes progress we have made with RealT!

Purchase to Ownership in 4̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶s̶ 15 Minutes

RealT is constantly reducing purchase-to-settlement time. We’ve gotten it so low that we’re breaking world records for property transfer times. And we’re not even done.

We wrote that back in October, when average order turn-around was 4 hours (for customers with previous orders).

Today, that time has been reduced to about 15 minutes.

This time-reduction has come from improvements in a number of different areas:

Purchase Agreement Automation

Every RealToken owner receives a Purchase Agreement in their inbox prior to RealToken delivery. This is the document that links the token to the real-world asset. It is the proof that token holders need to show ownership in the property.

The Ethereum transaction hash for the purchase is appended to the document, and users that have completed previous orders will soon receive the Purchase Agreement in their inbox automatically after making an order.

We still have improvements and optimizations we can make in this area, such as triggering a token delivery when the user signs, and condensing the whitelisting and token-delivery steps into the same transaction.

For now, we’re keeping a close eye on the system to make sure we account for all possible scenarios.

KYC / ID Verification Improvements

Dealing with tokenized securities is intimidating. When the words ‘securities’ and ‘cryptocurrency/blockchain’ occupy the same sentence, the word ‘compliance’ better be close behind.

Our backend KYC / ID Verification system is a robust set of software from an extremely thorough 3rd party provider, which brings in some of the top-tier analytics companies from both the crypto and traditional financial systems.

This is how we ensure two things at once:

All incoming investors are vetted to the maximum degree, to make sure we don’t allow in any bad actors.
User-data and investor information is securely stored in a private manner.

Fine-tuning this system has been a laborious process, but it’s something that is extremely important in order for RealT to compliantly serve our customers. Prioritizing this effort is how RealT will be able to continue to serve both current and future customers!

Today, RealT customers are able to go through the ID Verification process and receive an approval (or denial) in under an hour, and in some cases, instantaneously.

We still have improvements to make when it comes to users who need to go through the verification process a second time (to append second Ethereum address to their account, and the whitelist), and also increasing the rate of auto-approvals. Our goal is to have to 90+% auto-approve (or deny) by the end of 2020!

Rental Payment Consistency / Gas Reduction

Thanks to Disperse.app, we have been able to significantly reduce gas costs when it comes to sending out rent.

16200 Fullerton has 177 individual owners (‼) as of today, and individuals with just 1 Fullerton token receive just 0.07178 Dai / Day. Being able to bundle transactions is a huge UX upgrade, and it reduces some theoretical attacks that used to be possible under the old system (such as moving the token in an attempt to collect further rent).

The cool thing about bundling transactions is that the transaction cost per person goes down as more unique individuals own the property. Right now, it costs roughly $0.00237 per person to send them their rent money (this transaction used 1 Gwei). That number gets smaller every time a new owner comes onboard.

The Istanbul upgrade to Ethereum introduced ZK-Rollups, which will enable further improvements to gas optimization for use-cases like ours. However, now that rent payment gas costs are below $1 for all 300+ individual daily transactions, we’re focusing on other priorities for the moment.

We’re looking forward to sending out 10,000 daily transactions and needing to integrate Ethereum’s new features as part of our system!

Liquidity

Every single RealT property is available inside of Uniswap (details here). Uniswap is an absolutely phenomenal piece of infrastructure on Ethereum. It’s particularly beneficial to RealT, because:

It maintains the RealToken whitelist (only whitelisted users can interact with the relevant Uniswap exchange)
We can easily add a new market for every new RealT property we onboard.

9943 Marlowe, the first RealT property, has been traded on Uniswap a total of 116 transactions, for a total of 103.03 ETH in volume over those transactions.

RealT owns 90% of the liquidity in the Marlowe exchange. In 2020, we hope to reduce the percentage of the Uniswap pairs we control down to a minimum. We think it’s awesome that 8 other 9943 Marlowe owners are also Marlowe/ETH liquidity providers in the Uniswap Exchange, but we want this number to go up!

Stay tuned for an announcement related to this effort (hint: it’s called “The Uniswap LP Incentive Program).

Growing the Team!

We are hiring! If you are an Ethereum or Web Developer with the following experience, and are interested in coming onto the RealT team, please let us know!

Web and Ethereum Developers:

- Strong communication skills
- An energetic, disciplined work ethic
- HTML
- CSS + CSS preprocessors SASS, LESS
- Strong Javascript experience, including 1 or more modern javascript frameworks like Angular 8 or React 16
- Wordpress
- PHP
- Node JS (Express JS is a strong plus)
- Solidity + Ethereum experience