Methodology

Universe definition

The OpenReal universe is the set of every protocol that issues a tokenized claim on a real-world asset and is tracked by DefiLlama under the RWA category. At refresh time the universe contains roughly 149 protocols across seven sub-classes.

Sub-class attribution

Each protocol is mapped to one of: US Treasuries, Non-US Government Debt, Private Credit, Real Estate, Commodities, Stocks, or Other RWA. Attribution is rule-based against the protocol's brand name (e.g. BlackRock BUIDL → US Treasuries; Tether Gold → Commodities). The Stablecoins page uses a separate universe (DefiLlama Stablecoins API) because pegged-asset supply is reported on a different cadence than RWA TVL.

Metric formulas

Total Asset Value

Sum of each protocol's reported on-chain TVL across every chain it operates on. Multi-chain protocols (e.g. BUIDL on Ethereum + Aptos) are counted once at the protocol level and broken down per chain for the Network league table.

Change percentages (24h / 7D / 30D)

TVL-weighted aggregate change across the relevant universe slice. Per-protocol 24h and 7D values come directly from DefiLlama's /protocols endpoint. The 30D value is computed locally as 7D × 4 as a fast approximation; for the historical chart we use real per-protocol 30D data fetched from /protocol/{slug}.

Yield / APY

For yield-bearing instruments where DefiLlama Pro is not available, we use category-typical yield estimates derived from publicly disclosed fund prospectuses (US Treasuries ~5.0%, Non-US Government Debt ~3.5%, Private Credit ~9.5%, Real Estate ~7.0%, Commodities 0%, Stocks ~1.5%). A small per-protocol noise factor is applied so values are not identical across the table.

Holder counts

Estimated from market cap × category-typical retail-to-cap ratio. Treasuries and credit instruments are institutionally concentrated (≈30 holders per $1M); commodities and real estate are retail-heavy (250 / 80 per $1M). DefiLlama Pro / Alchemy token-holders calls would yield exact counts.

Net Capital Flows

Signed 7-day flow per fund is computed as change_7d% × current TVL. Positive = inflow (green), negative = outflow (red). The visualization ranks funds by absolute flow magnitude regardless of sign.

Refresh cadence

• DefiLlama indexer publishes new snapshots roughly every 5 minutes for current TVL and once per day around UTC midnight for the historical series.
• Browser polling every 30 seconds — each page re-fetches via its /api/*-refresh Next.js route. Sub-30s polling mostly hits the upstream cache.
• RSS news feeds (CoinTelegraph, The Block, Decrypt) are polled on the same 30s cadence and filtered to RWA-related articles by keyword.

Known limitations

• Per-protocol 30D APY uses a category-derived estimate rather than realized fund yield.
• Per-protocol holder counts are synthesized; they correlate with market cap but are not exact wallet counts.
• The Latest Transactions panel surfaces aggregate-derived "synthetic" transactions (large net flows rendered as a single representative tx). Real per-hash on-chain activity is available via Alchemy getAssetTransfers when wired to the backend.
• The DefiLlama free tier does not expose per-coin 7-day change for stablecoins. Per-coin historical is fetched for the top 5 stables only; the rest show their current peggedUSD without a change column.