Mike Dudas

Dudas’s central token test is brutally simple: explain where value accrues and how it reaches holders. Tokens and equity can coexist only when their roles are complementary and management communicates the bridge between them. Pure governance tokens fail because insiders control the vote and can direct fees elsewhere: “This model doesn’t work.”

Crypto’s investable opportunity is shifting from speculative infrastructure toward durable application-layer cash flow. High-throughput chains, deeper liquidity, stablecoins, money markets, prediction markets, and tokenized real-world assets kept operating through the early-2025-to-fall-2026 bear period. Dudas is “relentlessly optimistic” about applications over the next five years, even while expecting many L1, L2, and infrastructure tokens to disappear.

6MV now runs a barbell between high-velocity consumer speculation and slower, productive financial infrastructure. Pump.fun and sub-hour prediction markets fit actual onchain behavior; Squads, Dakota, Morpho, Aave, and Kamino represent the other pole, where users move money, borrow, and earn returns unavailable in ordinary brokerage accounts. The lesson from failed token-driven games was to “adapt to the reality of how people behave on blockchain.”

Today’s social-trading products acquire users through memes but still expose retail to structurally poor outcomes. Leading traders enter earlier, trade with size or privileged knowledge, and leave newcomers facing extreme slippage; Logan himself tried to grow a $100 account and failed. Platforms promise to graduate customers into stocks and better assets, but “you can’t let your customers lose money” indefinitely—and that graduation has not yet been demonstrated.

Access may matter more than legal or technical form, particularly outside the US. Stablecoins already exported dollar access; tokenized stocks, pre-IPO exposure, and synthetic markets could similarly export US capital markets, even with imperfect wrappers. Dudas wants “all assets on all blockchains” with deep liquidity and strong execution because users repeatedly choose “access over form.”

Chain specialization still matters, but chain identity is disappearing from the user experience. Dudas sees Solana as the default venue for diverse spot assets and Hyperliquid as today’s best onchain perpetuals venue, while Base and Robinhood-backed networks retain credible teams and distribution. Yet the average user arriving from a TikTok ad may never know which chain settles the trade—the wallet and infrastructure increasingly sit invisibly behind the app.

Crypto and AI may converge through markets and money rather than a single breakthrough hybrid product. Dudas connects Bitcoin’s conversion of “energy into money” with AI data centers converting “energy into intelligence”; 6MV is examining compute markets, open-source models, machine payments, lending, and agent-controlled capital. He is bullish on AI through 2035 but allows that standalone AI lab companies valued in the tens of billions—and perhaps venture activity around them—could be near a cyclical top.

🔗 Original source & video: What Gives Tokens Value? with Mike Dudas, Managing Partner at 6MV | EP 168