The Problem With Exposure-Based Models

For much of crypto’s lifespan, the conversation around real-world assets has revolved around exposure. Build a wrapper. Back it with collateral. Track the value. The aim has been to bring off-chain things into digital form so they could be traded, split, or borrowed against. The premise: make assets more accessible. But something’s been missing from that model. Not in theory, in design.

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Performance Is the Missing Link

Exposure isn’t participation. Representation isn’t performance. Most tokenised assets have abstracted the activity they claim to unlock. What’s visible onchain is rarely the thing that creates the cashflow.

At DualMint, we approached the problem from the other side: Not “How do we wrap the business?”But: “What mechanism connects operational surplus to capital, without an intermediary?”

When infrastructure performs, it generates margin. That margin, in most systems, is trapped inside the business. Only equity owners or private lenders ever touch it. That’s the real friction. The friction is structural: output doesn’t move.

So we removed the wrapper and focused on direct participation in financial result.

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A Deployment Without Assumptions

Our first deployment, AirUp, wasn’t a proposal. It was infrastructure that had already been installed. Commercial A/C units had already been retrofitted with hardware. Power consumption had already dropped. Surplus was already being logged.

The only thing added was the stream.

Stablecoin, routed to ERC-721 holders, based on the actual performance of the device. If it runs, the stream runs. If it doesn’t, it stops. No need for trust, or treasury. Just one condition: output exists.

This is income flow. And nothing gets minted unless the margin’s real.

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When Hardware Becomes the Product

Most financial products require explanation. This doesn’t. A machine that reduces 2,500 kWh a year is not a claim. It’s a number.

And when that number becomes a stream of USDC routed to a connected onchain participant, there’s no room for optimism to cloud the value. The data does the talking.

This, we believe, is a foundational shift, not in storytelling, but in product structure.

There is no roadmap. There is no theoretical IRR. There is no treasury-backed emission to simulate activity. There is hardware. And the hardware either delivers or it doesn’t.

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Real-Time Output as Yield Infrastructure

Crypto has spent the last few years optimising systems that point to future value. But the more abstraction gets layered, the more fragile that value becomes.

AirUp demonstrated that the opposite is also true. Remove the abstraction. Show the operation. Let performance become the stream.

This turns physical systems into programmable rails for yield, without relying on balance sheet credit, or narrative momentum, or protocol-scale coordination.

What matters is uptime. That’s the yield primitive. And when it’s verifiable, the chain doesn’t need to model it. It can settle it.

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A Category Defined by Margin

This isn’t DeFi applied to the real world. It’s the real world applied to DeFi.

Every laundromat. Every vending machine. Every watt reduced. These are not parts of a supply chain to be securitised. They’re functioning yield units. Each one verifiable. Each one priced by its margin.

We don’t treat infrastructure as collateral. We treat it as logic. If it earns, it pays. If it stops, it doesn’t.

It’s not exposure. It’s participation. And in that framing, the product isn’t the asset. The product is the outcome.

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What Comes Next

We’re not the only ones asking these questions. Across ecosystems, a new category is forming, one where real-world performance is routed.

Vaults will standardise it. Composability will expand it. But the base unit remains simple: margin-producing systems that can stream their output onchain, with no step in between.

AirUp was our first deployment on @arbitrum.It sold out in days.Just infrastructure connected to capital.And that’s where the future begins.

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