Today, RealT is a market leader in real estate tokenization. Launched in 2019, RealT has built a dynamic and engaged investor community of over 16,100 active investors from 154 different countries. We have tokenized over 535 properties for $101 million, ranging from single-family homes to large residential buildings. Our ecosystem enables investors worldwide to be the “landlords of the future”. They can own a fraction of a financial instrument (represented by a token), receive net revenues, and buy or sell their tokens in 2 clicks with no administrative formalities thanks to DeFi. For over 5 years, RealT has enabled anyone, anywhere in the world, to become an owner as long as they have an Internet connection and a smartphone. It’s a real revolution in investment.
Since the last quarter of 2023, RealT has been looking to diversify its products and has begun offering new assets such as Bitcoin container tokenization and private equity. Before detailing our ambitions, let’s look back at the key elements that have enabled RealT to become the market leader.
A look back at RealT’s genesis
It’s important to note that in 2019, no one knew about or believed in Real Estate tokenization. Entrepreneurs tackling this market would need a multidisciplinary skill set.
Five years later, it is clear that the Jacobson brothers have succeeded in bringing together the five key success factors:
1. Clear, transparent communication through the DeFi Codes
2. A reassuring regulatory framework for investors
3. Real estate expertise
4. Knowledge and mastery of technology
5. A Minimum Viable Community (MVC)
If you read the biographies of Jean-Marc Jacobson and Remy Jacobson in the appendix, you’ll see that these two brothers had the profile and experience to make their bet a success.
Clear, transparent communication
To convince early adopters of the benefits of Real Estate tokenization, we needed a message and a slogan that everyone could understand:
“Buy a fraction of a property in 2 clicks on Monday, collect the rent every day to pay for your coffee on the patio, and sell your investment on Friday night to go away for the weekend”.
In other words, tokenization involves converting a real-world asset into one or more tokens, enabling a wide range of investors to securely own their assets via the blockchain. Projects built on top of the blockchain enrich the power of the token by fragmenting it (lower entry ticket, ease of diversification), receiving income more frequently, and having increased liquidity via sale on the secondary market or collateralization.
Once this seed had been sown in the minds of users, it was time to deliver this promise through a controlled, integrated process across the entire value chain:
From the very start, RealT has embraced the DeFi ethic of transparency and open-source, staying close to its community, whether via Telegram or YouTube, with a weekly live stream for over five years. Whether in Web 3.0, or even less so in Web 2.0, to our knowledge, there are very few other companies that maintain such proximity to their founders.
Asset selection based on real estate expertise
As a reminder, RealT started out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the real estate sector was shaken by numerous challenges. During this period, RealT not only identified and tokenized real estate assets, but also ensured efficient rent collection. Thanks to the government’s Section 8 program, rents were collected without delay, testifying to the know-how of the founders.
RealT’s excellence is reflected not only in its operational management, but also in its financial performance. With over $15 million in net revenues distributed directly to token holders’ portfolios, RealT has proven its ability to generate stable returns. Thanks to its economies of scale and concentric circle acquisitions, the value of properties under management has risen by an average of over 15%, demonstrating once again the experience of over 40 years in the real estate business.
At the end of 2022, RealT even proposed to its investors to de-tokenize 18983 Alcoy Ave following a very attractive offer — a world-first.
In 2023, despite a turbulent year for the real estate sector, marked by a significant slowdown in transactions and revenues for many companies, RealT successfully maintained its sales, revenues, and rental rates for tokenized properties. With a vacancy rate below the national average of 6.6% and the Michigan average of 7.9% — the region chosen to establish a significant presence — RealT once again demonstrates its mastery of its niche expertise.
A regulatory framework that reassures investors
At RealT, careful property selection is just the first step in an investment process designed to ensure investor security. During the tokenization process, cheaper and faster ways were proposed. From day one, RealT opted to issue Security Tokens to comply fully with regulatory requirements. This decision is far more demanding, in terms of both human and financial costs, guaranteeing unrivalled peace of mind for investors.
For Europe, RealT has teamed up with leading partners and top-notch legal advisors, aiming to offer a reliable and robust European product. RealT’s European subsidiary, with five years’ experience as a pioneer in the tokenization of real assets, is well on the way to becoming a key player in tokenization in Europe.
In 2024, RealT is building on its momentum by launching new products and introducing innovative new legal structures. This includes the launch of an equity token, enabling direct investment in RealT through an SPV based in Switzerland, a pioneering jurisdiction in many regulatory respects.
In the second quarter of 2024, RealT’s ambition is to continue innovating with the equity token, which will benefit from a new regulatory structure, used by leading traditional institutions and major DeFi protocols.
A committed community
Thanks to its evangelization work and respect for the DeFi and open-source codes, RealT has succeeded in developing a loyal community of over 16,100 committed investors.
Some members are more involved than others in our ecosystem, whether in producing educational content, onboarding and answering questions from new members, testing our new products, or creating new ones. This dynamic and proactive approach is one of the essential pillars of our plan to gradually decentralize our ecosystem.
For those curious to discover all these community initiatives, you’ll find them on this page.
Together, during these first 5 years, we have succeeded in building a visionary community, united around shared values. Alongside its community, RealT has already experienced its fair share of FUD, with a Bear Market, the momentary collapse of several stablecoins such as xDai and USDC.
Considering the significant events of recent months, it’s understandable that some people express their opinions vehemently, guided more by their emotions than by rationality.
The first tenant rotation is another perfect example. Rotation is a healthy step in the management of a property portfolio, and this process has been misinterpreted by some in our community. Despite our ongoing upstream communication, a flawless track record since 2019, and an occupancy rate that remains above the national average, this situation provoked emotional reactions from some members. This trend was repeated when fraud was committed by malicious real estate players in Detroit, leading to an attempt to damage our reputation by associating ourselves with it.
Other people have wanted to do us harm, sharing photos of some of our barricaded properties, mentioning that they were abandoned on social networks. On the contrary, this preventive measure protects properties between rentals from squatters or damage.
These incidents underline the fact that, despite our past successes, community loyalty can never be taken for granted, and can’t be bought with, for example, a more-than-attractive return. It is earned on a daily basis through a constant commitment to innovation, the development of our ecosystem and the pursuit of this shared vision. Today, we’re proud to say that, thanks to this commitment, we’ve built a loyal community base capable of being rational in the face of new misinformation campaigns.
Indeed, with the arrival of its community fund-raising for RealT’s equity investment, the governance token to manage the protocol, and the DAO bringing its share of speculation, RealT and its community are aware that the ‘RealToken’ protocol will go through phases of skepticism and misinformation (FUD). Poor management of these situations can be fatal to a project. The experience we’ve accumulated over the last few years allows us to look ahead with confidence. So far, without a governance token, the motivation, and determination of our team and community have remained unshaken. We are convinced that this will not change, regardless of changes in the token’s value. Up and down.
Without economic incentives, it’s fascinating to observe all these community initiatives. Imagine tomorrow, what this community could achieve if it could be “skin in the game” with an economic incentive decided and voted by its members.
RealT, solid barriers to entry
Today, for many projects, tokenization is seen as the new shiny object, just like AI. We’ve seen many projects announcing blockchain-based assets at the time of their fund-raising. After a few months, technical, legal, and operational reality caught up with them. It’s not uncommon to see the term “tokenization” replaced by “fractionalization”. For projects that manage to overcome these barriers, asset tokenization and blockchain have many structural advantages.
Blockchain enables a standardized global information, distribution, and accounting system. This new peer-to-peer system eliminates multiple intermediaries. Previously, everyone operated with their own system, which slowed down and complicated financial transactions while charging fees at the same time. This innovation transforms processes and financial management for these new players, by enabling automatic reconciliation of financial transactions.
In five years, RealT has successfully met the challenge of connecting this innovation with software and standards from the traditional financial industry, while continuing to partner with DeFi’s most avant-garde projects. Having been the first real estate tokenization platform on Ethereum, RealT was also the first to collaborate with Uniswap since the last quarter of 2019.
Let’s look back together at what has been achieved with the community over the past 5 years. This will give us a clearer and more credible picture of what we can achieve over the next 5 years with the community lift and DAO.
RealT, a solid technological advantage
Q1 2019 — World’s first real estate tokenization platform
RealT made history by launching the world’s first real estate tokenization platform in the first quarter of 2019 on the Ethereum blockchain. Since then, RealT has surrounded itself with leading companies in their field. We could, for example, mention Mt Pelerin, a Swiss company, a forerunner in its field, which by 2018 had tokenized part of its shares. Beyond the favorable Swiss legal framework, the company is known for its security token offerings and its OFF/ON Ramp service. It is also thanks to this close collaboration that we were able to launch, during the last quarter of 2024, the possibility of withdrawing our investors’ income by transfer directly into their bank accounts.
Q4 2019 — First integration of a security token in a DEX
As 2019 draws to a close, RealT is demonstrating its desire to integrate into relevant DeFi protocols as quickly as possible. After several weeks’ work with one of Uniswap’s founders, RealT was the first platform to offer security tokens on a decentralized exchange (DEX) while remaining compliant with regulations. For those of you in the know, at that time we were still using the first version of the Uniswap protocol. We were still a long way from DeFi Summer 2020, which brought decentralized finance its first wave of adoption. We were also more than a year away from the famous airdrop of 400 UNI per wallet, which was offered to all liquidity providers. Since 2019, the “early adopters” who put their trust in us have been able to both learn and understand the workings of DeFi, while benefiting from additional returns by interacting with some of these protocols.
As a result, by the end of 2019, RealT was able to start demonstrating how decentralized finance could enhance real estate investment by making it liquid 24/7.
Q4 2020 — Multichain with Ethereum and Gnosis
For those of you who were already RealToken Holders back in 2020, you’ll no doubt remember that first phase in the democratization of decentralized finance with “DeFi Summer”. Fees on the Ethereum blockchain exploded. Offering tokenized real estate for as little as $50 on this network no longer made sense. In the most congested periods of the network, sending RealTokens and revenues could cost more than the price of the property itself!
In 2020, part of the community had difficulty understanding our choice to deploy on the Gnosis Chain blockchain, formerly known as the “xDai Chain”. For RealT, the choice was obvious. Gnosis was the only blockchain offering predictable and structurally low transaction and operational costs, thanks to gas fees paid in xDai. In this way, we avoided the danger of reliving the explosion in transaction costs experienced on Ethereum. This choice may at first have seemed curious to our community, since during the last bull cycle, Gnosis didn’t use the same budgets and marketing strategies to make itself known to the general public.
Then, in November 2021, the xDai and GnosisDAO communities voted to combine their ecosystems and renamed the blockchain “Gnosis Chain”. GnosisDao is renowned for the quality of its developers, and its products are unanimously acclaimed in the ecosystem. Since the summer of 2023, the blockchain’s TVL has increased 6.5-fold from 52 million to 343 million — and transaction fees have remained minimal.
Thanks to its ambitious roadmap, Gnosis Chain has succeeded in attracting veteran and innovative DeFi projects such as 1inch, Aave, Balancer, Monerium and Maker with sDai. The strength of RealT and these partners, in addition to the deployment of their innovations such as the Gnosis card, will enable the RealToken ecosystem to create some excellent synergies in the coming months.
Developing a real-world protocol requires a certain amount of expertise. Developing an infrastructure on two blockchains simultaneously doesn’t just double the complexity and workload. In fact, it multiplies the technological, administrative, and accounting complexities, as well as all the internal systems that need to be constantly updated. The process goes far beyond simply issuing tokens on Ethereum and Gnosis. RealT can now deploy its tokens cross-chain if required.
Q1 2021 — Launch of reinvestment property to compound revenues
In 2021, RealT continues to innovate, once again demonstrating the power of tokenization by distributing revenues directly in the form of a “reinvestment house” token. Thanks to blockchain, RealT can pay out net revenues on a weekly basis. Because of the costs involved in the traditional system, conventional players allow, at best, rents to be distributed monthly or quarterly. Whether you earn 1 cent a week or several thousand dollars like some RealToken Holders, every investor can receive his or her income directly in tokens from a new property which itself generates income, allowing the power of compounding income to be used to its full potential. To continue with A. Einstein’s quotes: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it gets rich, he who doesn’t pays it”. Since the launch of this feature, over $3.6 million has been distributed in this way.
Then, in early 2023, RealT, ever attentive to the needs of its community, proposed a new way of distributing revenues on a weekly basis with “armmWXDAI”. Despite the wacky name, this acronym simply means xDai deposited on the RMM. That’s around $900,000 in net income distributed in 2023 through this channel. If you’re new to our ecosystem, you’re probably wondering what is RMM? Read on to discover another RealT innovation.
Finally, thanks to this common infrastructure offered by blockchain and DeFi, if an investor doesn’t want to keep his distributed income indexed against the $ or doesn’t want to opt for the reinvestment house, he can exchange it for a gold-backed token or a stablecoin backed by euros or other currencies in two clicks.
Q4 2021 — Launch of payments with Request Finance
RealT continues to innovate in late 2021 with the introduction of payments via Request Finance. This partnership has enabled our community to discover a company revolutionizing accounting and cash management for a Web3 company on the one hand, and financial management for an individual who has chosen to become unbanked on the other.
Request.finance, the leader in its market, has already processed over $500 million in crypto payments, and offers an integrated Off ramp solution for managing supplier and customer invoices, as well as employee salaries.
Request finance also has another feature that enables us to issue an unlimited number of invoices securely and scalable during property sales. It was this feature that enabled our investors to pay their invoices directly on Gnosis Chain. Today, this payment method is the most popular with our community. This service offered by Request eliminates many intermediaries since settlement is made directly on the blockchain.
Q2 2022 — Launch of RMM: 1st RWA collateralization platform
On April 14, 2022, the “RealToken” ecosystem launched RMM, the first collateralization platform for real-world assets. To launch this platform, RealToken partnered with loan leader AAVE, where today over 15 billion assets are deposited in the protocol.
To sum up RMM in one sentence, it’s like AAVE but for RWAs.
The first version of RMM was a “proof of concept” to familiarize the community and test the parameters. This test phase was more than conclusive, as despite the low number of properties made available, the TVL, “Total Value Locked” exceeded $12 million. Instead of focusing on the development of this version, RealT chose to collaborate again with AAVE for the development of the new version of RMM, including a brand new technological infrastructure.
Having implemented the necessary AAVE code, the audit of the part of the code that was modified to meet the characteristics and requirements of RealTokens, was able to be partly financed by the revenue generated by the first version of the protocol.
RealT has also chosen to collaborate with Chainlink, the market leader in oracles, on the “Price Feeds” of properties added to the RMM.
In 2024, the rollout of RMM version 3 marked a major turning point for the entire ecosystem. Gradually, it will be possible to integrate all properties on the platform, resulting in a tenfold increase in the number of theoretical RealTokens to be deposited as collateral. In addition, the introduction of new stablecoins, such as the USDC, will facilitate the arrival of new participants while increasing the liquidity available.
Thanks to this new version, new synergies and integrations with other DeFi projects are under discussion to bring new use cases to Armmwxdai / Armmusdc.
As a result of these developments, we expect RMM revenues to increase by a factor of 10 in 2024, reaching $200,000 over a rolling 12-month period.
Between the partnerships under discussion and our ambitious roadmap, we’re confident that this revenue will increase by a further 10-fold by 2025, to reach $2,000,000.
Q3 2022 — Launch of “Walletless”: Investing with a Web2 Experience
RealT’s aim has always been to democratize both real estate investment and the synergies offered by DeFi. However, for a brand-new user, the ecosystem’s technological barriers to entry can put many off.
The third quarter of 2022 saw the launch of the “Walletless” functionality. Users could start investing as little as $50 with their credit card, without having to worry about creating and managing a “Wallet”. It was a resounding success, with 46% of our new Token Holders using this option. What made us even prouder was that 34% of “WalletLess” users migrated to a Web3 wallet after realizing the opportunities offered by DeFi through the “RealToken” protocol.
Q4 2022 — Launch of YAM: Peer-to-Peer Secondary Market
At the end of 2022, RealT introduced “YAM” (You and Me), a peer-to-peer secondary market that revolutionized, once again, the way RWAs can be exchanged. This platform enabled users to buy and sell tokens directly from peer to peer.
YAM has also increased liquidity, with over 50,000 transactions and more than $6,000,000 exchanged since its launch. We’re proud of these figures, which show constant growth month after month, increasing the liquidity of our entire ecosystem.
Other players, to raise funds or boost the value of their tokens, could have inflated these figures by “wash trading”, a mechanism that would have cost RealT only around ten dollars, given the low cost of transactions on the Gnosis Chain. With this process, we could easily have boasted 1 million transactions and a volume in excess of $100 million. RealT refuses to engage in this kind of practice. Every step of the way, RealT reaffirms its desire to build a healthy ecosystem alongside its community, while striving to remain as transparent as possible.
But don’t take our word for it, and as the crypto community so aptly puts it, “don’t trust, verify”. Thanks to this tool built by a member of the community, you can verify it for yourself and analyze the statistics that interest you.
Q1 2023 — Updating our scaling infrastructure
Aspiring to accommodate future mass adoption is one thing, but actually giving ourselves the means to do so is another, far more significant one. In the first quarter of 2023, we undertook a major upgrade of all our internal systems, now enabling us to tokenize several hundred assets a week, if necessary. Our accounting tools have also been optimized to integrate new crypto-assets or stablecoins with just a few clicks, allowing us great flexibility and readiness when we launch in the European market or other countries in Latin America.
At the same time, we are doubling our efforts to overhaul our website. It will be available in several languages, enriched with new functionalities and offer a better user experience, particularly during launches.
Mass adoption will also be achieved through the diversity of products we can offer.
Diversification of activities to prosper
Q2 2023 — Launch of new products
In the second quarter of 2023, RealT took the next step by creating “CSM” with other partners who are experts in their field, to launch the tokenization of Bitcoin containers. This new offering was a real success, as in just a few months, CSM tokenized and raised over $8.1 million. CSM’s tried-and-tested Swiss legal work was used for the community fundraising and tokenization of a portion of RealT’s own shares. These first two transactions demonstrate RealT’s ambition to diversify into new asset classes and attract private equity investors.
Q1 2024 — Geographic real estate diversification
After many months of work to develop new territories in the United States, RealT has opened new markets in St. Louis, Missouri and Montgomery, Alabama. As the community has responded, RealT will continue to develop its presence in this new territory, while continuing to open new locations. For the second half of the year, RealT intends to continue penetrating new markets in Latin America, in addition to Turkey and other selected jurisdictions.
Q2 2024 — Diversification of marketed products
After more than 5 years of offering a model based on equity tokenization, RealT aims to offer new types of real estate tokens. The aim is both to target a new clientele attracted by stable income and to enable our current investor base to continue diversifying their wealth.
In the second half of the year, we also plan to launch the Y token. Its aim is to acquire properties at auction or at very low prices, requiring major renovations, refurbish them, stabilize them with a tenant, and then resell them. This new product offers returns at the time of resale — if there is a capital gain — rather than via income distribution through rent collection.
At the same time, RealT plans to gradually roll out various “tokenization as a service” modules and market certain products on a white-label basis. The development of the YAM for CSM has validated the proof of concept.
RealToken, the ideal solution for mass adoption
Despite all this technological work and the community’s help in guiding new investors into the world of Web3, DeFi remains a barrier that is sometimes difficult to overcome.
Abstract and complex mechanisms
For many, crypto and blockchain remain abstract things, not palpable and unrelated to the real world. To top it all off, this ecosystem uses lingo that is incomprehensible to the general public. On X (formerly Twitter), DeFi experts regularly post this kind of strategy:
“Bro I make 25% return on my portfolio, look how simple it is:
1. I have my $ on Ramp to buy ETH on Mt Pelerin.
2. I exchanged those ETH for LSD to get a native yield of about 4%.
3. I then deposited this LSD on AAVE for collateral purposes and borrowed a € stablecoin.
4. I decided to short this € stablecoin by exchanging it on a DEX for a Yield Bearing stablecoin yielding around 5% a year. Unfortunately, I took a 2% slippage because liquidity was still low on the DEX. If you want to do the same strategy, wait 2 weeks, you should have better liquidity. The first snippets are starting this week and liquidity should kick in.
5. Then, on another blockchain, I saw an interesting yield opportunity by becoming a liquidity provider and then depositing my proof of deposit on a yield optimizer, so I decided to bridge my tokens.
6. All in all, I end up with a strategy that earns me around 25% a year.
But bro, I can be REKT at any time by a flaw in a smart contract or by the impermanent loss or a DEPEG of the token”.
If you’ve understood this gibberish, then congratulations, you’re one of those advanced DeFi users, and we’re waiting for you to make proposals in the DAO on the DeFi strategy section. On the other hand, as you’ve guessed, all this lingo is completely incomprehensible to the average person.
Yet, by applying these concepts to our ecosystem linking the real world and Web3, certain notions can quickly become approachable. WalletLess is a case in point: one in two customers started out with this solution. Then, thanks to our ecosystem and caring community, around one in three investors gradually took the plunge and started exploring DeFi.
Here are a few examples:
When an investor wishes to invest in realt.co, he has the choice of paying by credit card or crypto. If he wishes to opt for the second option, he must exchange his so-called “Fiat” currency (€, $, etc.) for crypto-assets. This process is simply called “On Ramp”. Conversely, if a week after his purchase, he wishes to exchange his received income into stablecoin and withdraw it to his bank account, this process is called the “Off Ramp”. To guide newcomers, the community has created several step-by-step tutorials.
Subsequently, intermediate investors decide to collateralize their RealTokens to improve the profitability of their investment by borrowing a stablecoin against a fraction of the value of its RealToken. Understanding these mechanics with a RealToken connected to the real world is more accessible, unlike the complex approach of our ‘crypto guy’: “I then deposited this LSD on AAVE, so I could collateralize them and borrowed a stablecoin €.”
Once the net income has been received on Gnosis Chain, some investors want to send it to their bank account or another blockchain, so they’ve learned what a bridge is. Using some bridges like Connext, some investors have received additional income via an airdrop. Connext, for example, offered and distributed tokens to thank all the users who had used their project.
Finally, some wished to buy or resell new RealTokens on the secondary market, starting by familiarizing themselves with the YAM, which enables users to post offers to buy and sell among themselves, free of charge. Then others chose to take an interest in the mechanisms of liquidity pools with DEXs. As a result, they came to understand new concepts such as slippage, impermanent loss, liquidity mining, and so on. Each user of our ecosystem can discover this new industry at his or her own pace.
An ecosystem under permanent construction
You’ve probably heard the story of someone who became a millionaire thanks to Bitcoin. Unfortunately, they lost everything because they no longer had access to their wallet and their famous “private key” or “seed phrase”.
Beyond DeFi, which can be difficult to grasp, the real barrier to technological entry lies in the installation and management of the wallet. You’ve probably already heard the famous saying, “Not your keys, not your coins”.
Aware of this problem, RealT had proposed a response with “WalletLess”. However, this functionality did not allow interaction with DeFi and the rest of our ecosystem. In 2023, EIP-4337 was deployed, creating a new style of wallet: the “abstract account”. Once again, a forerunner, RealT decided to abandon “Walletless”, despite all the effort invested in this solution, to concentrate on developing this new functionality with its many advantages.
The abstract account offers enhanced security:
It’s no longer necessary to manage the “seed phrase”, and it’s possible to create an account by logging in with an e-mail or Facebook account, then adding additional layers of security with a 2FA, SMS, etc.
The abstract account enhances the user experience:
Today, on Ethereum, you need ETH to cover transaction costs, while on the Gnosis Chain, xDai are required. When you want to carry out a simple transaction, you actually have to complete three steps: sign, approve, and finally confirm the transaction. Thanks to account abstraction, these complications are solved, allowing you to pay transaction fees with any token. What used to require three separate steps can now be accomplished in a single operation.
At RealT, we’re convinced that this kind of innovation will enable Web3 to follow the same adoption curve as the internet. As mentioned in our introduction, only agile, mobile businesses with a desire to constantly reinvent themselves will see significant growth and traction, compared to other projects that will take several years to implement changes like abstract account.
Take a look at the properties available on RealT: https://realt.co/ and follow our social media below.
Telegram (English)
Telegram (Français)
Telegram (Español)
