Real Yield
A return measured after subtracting the effect of newly created supply, or a return paid out of fees rather than out of newly minted tokens.
The term is used in two related ways. First, as arithmetic: nominal staking yield minus the token's supply growth rate, which shows whether a staker's share of total supply is actually rising. Second, as a description of funding source: rewards paid from fees collected in an external asset, rather than by minting the protocol's own token to pay its own holders. The distinction matters because a reward funded by issuance partly pays a holder with their own dilution, whereas a cash dividend in equity markets cannot dilute the recipient. Fee-funded rewards have their own limitation: they rise and fall with usage and can go to nearly zero in quiet periods.
In practice
A staker earning rewards at the same rate as supply is growing keeps a constant share of supply, which is what the inflation-adjusted version of the calculation shows.
The common misunderstanding
Real yield here usually means adjusted for the asset's own supply growth, not adjusted for consumer prices as the phrase means in economics.
The figure this maps to
The staking rate after subtracting the dilution caused by new tokens issued to the whole supply.
Limits: The result depends entirely on which supply-growth figure is used: gross issuance and issuance net of a fee burn can differ enough to flip the sign, and on Ethereum the EIP-1559 base-fee burn can exceed issuance during sustained congestion, making net supply growth negative and the real yield…