How does a smart contract price an asset that almost never trades?

Tokenized private credit, commercial real estate, and infrastructure funds are the fastest-growing RWA categories, but they rarely have an active order book to read. A May 2026 empirical study across nine non-stablecoin RWA markets confirmed near-zero secondary trading and no reliable market price for most of them. When DeFi lending protocols accept these tokens as collateral, they fall back on quarterly third-party appraisals pushed through centralized oracle feeds, a process that is slow, expensive, and vulnerable to stale data. The gap between continuous on-chain settlement and episodic off-chain valuation means collateral can silently become undercollateralized between appraisal cycles with no mechanism to trigger a margin call.