It has been 1.5 years since I last documented my experience with RealT. It has been an adventure and a huge progress with them and I wish I could document these more regularly. A lot happened since then and I want to write about the stuff I think are important for me and the community.

My previous articles were on medium. It is time to move on to web3 integrated website and I think mirror will work wonders in the future.

I’m gonna start with what I thought was bad in my previous article.

1- Most exchanges don’t support XDAI, yet. Getting money back to your bank account with low cost is hard.

XDAI(crypto USD) support is still limited within CEXes (Centralized exchanges) but getting money from XDAI to your bank is much easier nowadays with several alternatives (MtPelerin / Monerium). My preferred method is using Binance but if you live in EU you can directly get it to your bank account. Not bad anymore.

2- Aave Lending never matured probably abandoned, Agave on XDAI is not live yet.

Aave was not abandoned, was just low priority at the time. Lending market has started with RMM and now there is a vote to move it to Aave v3. I used it to borrow some funds and it worked flawlessly. Definitely a way to borrow money with your RealT assets if you require some fast cash and don’t have access to $ credit, or you want to leverage with your funds. Alternatively you can lend here and get 4% (variable) on your XDAI. Lending based on Real assets. We dreamed of this in 2019. Kudos to the team for making it a reality.

3- Swapcat alternative and RealT website Realtoken YAM for token trading has been established. It is rudimentary and slow right now but there will be progress as everything with RealT.

I’d say 4 of the previous 6 opportunities I mentioned in my previous article has been seized. There have also been other initiatives worth a mention:

• There was a time when we weren’t able to buy tokens from RealT website with the distributed rents on Gnosis Chain (Previously known as XDAI). With the help of Request.network integration we can use our USDC/XDAI to buy tokens directly from RealT.

• Weekly rent reports are being sent now so you can check and compare your previous rents and their source. Best weeks are when rental payments increase and it is up to you to figure out why. It would be a good addition to see why it happened.

• Tokens and rents can now be sent to different addresses. This was something I wanted as I now have a wallet that I use to access my rent without accessing my tokens within the same address. It has dramatically increased security practices in my opinion. I checked my emails to see whether changing property wallets triggered an email but I didn’t see any.

• Detokenization of the first property sold to RealT holders took place in 2022. Holders of the property held a vote and decided to sell it for a total of 35% total return. We will likely see many more detokenizations in the coming years.

I wrote this snippet last year when I was first contemplating about this post even before ETH staking came along:

ETH-L2 migration

When ETH2 comes it won’t directly improve the scaling of ETH it will just change the consensus mechanism. After ETH2 comes live a couple of iterations later sharding comes and that’s how it scales. I think that’s like at least 2–3 years away. If we are right and ETH becomes the defacto standard beacon for many chains/L2s then it stands to reason we will never get cheap fees on ETH. Unless we get lucky and NFT mania stops and every NFT hodler leaves ETH never to return(Highly unlikely IMO).

I have migrated 1/3 of assets from ETH. I’m still using some dapps, but I have consolidated a lot of alts that I was hodling. It is not for the average end users anymore. The writing is on the wall. We took our sweet time coming to L2 and left dead tokens there. Maybe I’m wrong and a kill switch exists on the main contract and it just kills all tokens in 1 flash and then easily created on XDAI. We shall see but I don’t think we will be able to move them to L2 ourselves, I would definitely not bother with my 50$ tokens. They have been stuck there since March 2020.

Realt moved all old assets to Gnosis chain (XDAI) and we didn’t have to do a thing except for signing 2 documents. Unless you are a lucky guy and can buy Realt assets in bulk I’d say not to bother with ETH mainnet.

There are probably many other things on the progress of RealT that I forgot to mention but my personal experience over 3 years has been quite positive and unchanged from my previous article. I have got some worries related to long term plays which I want to address within this section.

• Detroit, Detroit and more Detroit. We are on our merry way to buy all of Detroit soonish /s. I wanted alternatives especially outside of USA so did the team but it has never been a priority even after 3 years. RealT will hit no roadblocks due to this but after 3 years I’d have expected some progress here. I know team is working on it but still not a priority and almost no progress after 3 years.

• Fake tokens have been deployed on XDAI and some users got scammed on swap.cat. As Power users we had to do basic controls first but scammers are really handy with their tools. I didn’t buy any of the scam tokens but it was a hard process to understand which tokens are real. Hopefully these things will be remedied in YAM.

• Some users had their tokens stolen due key mismanagement. I realized that after I tried buying those tokens because they were listed for a cheap price on swap.cat but luckily the affected user contacted RealT and stopped its transfer. He was able to get some of its tokens back but not without some loss. Hacker was able to sell some of the tokens. I’m not sure if there was ever a public report of it but you can find some information on discord. Also not sure how many such events took place. Not really a RealT problem but it happens in all crypto, RealT is not immune. “Not your keys, not your coin; your keys your coin” said crypto Guru Andreas Antonopoulos and they can be stolen I might add. Imagine losing your home because you got careless or were tricked somehow. This is a very real threat.

• There was a topic of residency that came up very early in RealT. USA doesn’t allow for residency by ownership of real estate but there are other countries that does. If tokenized ownership of a country’s real estate could offer citizenship or residency RealT ownership would benefit from that. Since we have not ventured forth beyond USA, this point is moot. If I ever had the option to get residency with real estate RealT would be my main access point as I trust them now. No point in trying to figure out if such a service is provided by another team. Ownership of ETF in a country does not give any rights within that country but tokenized ownership might. I really hope this becomes possible in the future. A friend asked me whether I would trust RealT so much that I’d be willing to sell my investment home and invest the proceeding within RealT. My answer was no, because I would want a whole home for myself that is maintained by RealT approved property managers. That is not possible yet.

• My vision of becoming a digital real estate agent is going nowhere as even the best of crypto native friends don’t wanna deal with the tokens and XDAI payments. Over the years I was only able to convince 2 people and only 1 stayed. They want the payment in the bank. For people who don’t want custody and just want payments, there should be such a route. I’m also not sure what exactly tokenization has provided. After the novelty of trading on uniswap and being able to swap directly with each other through sites such as swap.cat wears off, I’m just accumulating tokens in semi cold storage. I’d now prefer not to deal with any of these and just get rental payments. Tokens can stay with RealT for all I care and if something goes wrong we need their help anyway. If possible I’d return all the tokens back to RealT and just get rent and not worry about the security of the tokens. Are the cost savings for RealT that much when we secure them?

• Uniswap v3 didn’t come to Gnosis chain yet. I always thought this would be a perfect solution for RealT assets but hopefully in the coming years we will get to try them and offer market making for RealT assets.

RealT is by far the best and largest Real World Asset (RWA) deployer in Real Estate with over 100M$ worth property sold in crypto world. My only regret is not buying more RealT during the FED/Covid market bubble. It still is a no brainer investment as it provides continuous stream of cash flow even during the worst of financial times.

Now there are other companies that have started to pop up over time. The ones we have looked at lofty.ai, landshare and honeybricks. Hopefully we will have more information about them in the future. I also think tokenization won’t stop here, I think there will be more RWA especially in finance moving over to crypto.

Talking things on RealT discord is not always possible so we have created an alternative place to search about tokenization of RWA. If you want to join discussion, contribute or even want to chat things about crypto you can join here.

If you found this helpful, you can buy the NFT or send some funds to this address, or you know just join our discord.