Risks

REALS removes one risk, a single issuer failing, and keeps others. These are the ones a holder should know.

Two issuers failing at once

The rule covers the worst single failure. If two issuers that do not depend on each other fail at the same time, the vault can come up short. The buffer above the rule's minimum softens this but does not remove it.

Gold and stocks move

Gold and the S&P 500 are not dollars: their prices move every day. The vault counts them at today's price, so a fall in gold or stocks shrinks the buffer, and minting waits until the rule holds again. Each of PAXG, XAUt0 and SPYx is capped at 15% of the vault to keep that move small.

Prices

The program trusts Pyth and Chainlink for prices, and SPYx's Raydium pool for the S&P 500. A wrong price that stays inside the limits could let a mint through that should have been refused. Bands, the $0.98 floor, the caps and, for SPYx, the 15-minute average limit how far one bad price can move the vault.

Stopped prices

If a dollar or credit token's price stops updating, minting stops and redeeming into it waits. Redeeming into the other tokens keeps working as long as their prices move. If every feed stopped at once, nobody could leave until one moved again.

Gold's price stops every weekend. The vault keeps counting gold at Friday's price for up to four days and trades none at it; a week-long gap would stop minting until gold moved again.

The program

The program has no admin instruction and no way to move tokens out of the vault except a redeem. It can be upgraded by its upgrade key, which is kept, not burned, so a bug can be fixed. That key is also a risk: whoever holds it could ship a different program.

Redeeming into a broken token

If a dollar token trades below $1, the program still pays it out as if worth $1. That protects the vault and everyone else in it, and it means the person who chose that token takes the gap. Redeem into a token whose issuer is fine.