What Gives Tokens Value? with Mike Dudas, Managing Partner at 6MV | EP 168
Summary
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.
Deep dive
1. 6MV grew from crypto’s information and liquidity flows
Dudas entered crypto full-time in 2018 after fintech roles including Google, PayPal, and Venmo. Running The Block placed him inside the information flow, but it also clarified the economic opportunity: “Cryptocurrency is about money, about markets, and about flows.” Without an engineering edge for building protocols, investing became the logical next move.
After selling The Block, personal NFT, token, and angel investments evolved into a roughly $7.5 million first fund in 2021, founded with longtime friend Sarkis Kesarjian. They wrote $100,000-$200,000 application-layer checks into companies such as Magic Eden, STEPN, Etherscan, and Relay, offering founders an unusual advantage: Dudas knew how to sharpen and amplify a product’s story.
Strong early results enabled a $140 million second fund in 2022, backed less by traditional endowments than by crypto-made family offices, funds of funds, and other nontraditional institutions. That capital was deployed through early 2025, again above rather than inside base-layer chains.
The portfolio construction problem was always liquidity versus durability. Venture normally takes years to distribute capital and, in Dudas’s telling, only 10%-15% of funds meaningfully outperform; crypto can return cash quickly, but even billion-dollar revenue bursts may lack the repeatability and protection of enduring technology franchises.
2. Better infrastructure turned the bear market into an adoption cycle
Five years ago, few crypto verticals looked capable of supporting sustainable businesses. Now L1s and L2s offer throughput, low fees, uptime, and reliability; market makers provide continuous onchain liquidity; and the asset menu has expanded beyond BTC, ETH, and SOL into stocks, pre-IPO shares, bonds, Treasuries, and other real-world instruments.
The early-2025-to-fall-2026 downturn felt more like apathy than capitulation. Prices and volumes weakened, but low-overhead applications still generated meaningful profit: stablecoins expanded beyond crypto trading, Aave and Morpho sustained money markets, prediction markets found demand, and Hyperliquid was another high-quality onchain trading app.
Institutional participation continued beneath bearish token sentiment. Dudas points to Stripe, DTCC, Western Union, banks discussing deposit tokens, and growing stablecoin usage as evidence that crypto infrastructure is merging with broader financial markets rather than remaining a self-contained asset casino.
Logan Jastremski’s pushback is that 2024 was psychologically harder precisely because nothing obviously broke: some products existed, but revenue and growth were insufficient, leaving assets to decay gradually. Dudas agrees that participants migrated toward AI, where effort appeared to generate more immediate returns, but expects crypto to catch up over the next few years.
3. “Read, write, own” gave way to finance that people actually use
The 2021-22 pitch promised crypto-native governance, community ownership, games, and metaverse economies. Dudas has not abandoned those outcomes, but he now assigns them a much longer horizon: PFP NFTs and meme coins were useful “battlegrounds” for learning onchain behavior, not the final form of blockchain value.
Jastremski’s analogy comes from RuneScape and World of Warcraft: much of the fun sat in auction houses and trading game goods, so if blockchains supply the financial rails, “you get the metaverse for free.” Dudas expects existing games and established value to move onchain before entirely new crypto games successfully manufacture both gameplay and intellectual property.
Physical collectibles are already following that path. Collector Crypt and Courtyard bundle assets such as Pokémon cards onchain, enabling global access, instant settlement, storage, fractionalization, and collateralization—advantages a conventional collector cannot readily obtain.
6MV’s own failed assumption was that token-driven communities would retain players for years while new games matured. Speculation attracted users more than gameplay, and even supposedly permanent communities weakened; Dudas cites Nouns going more than 100 days without a purchase as a warning against confusing ideological commitment with durable demand.
4. The winning barbell combines rapid transactions with productive capital
On the consumer side, 6MV now favors short-duration, fee-generating behavior. Pump.fun was funded as a general token-launch platform but gravitated toward meme coins because they were the “lowest friction, highest volume” assets; prediction markets likewise scaled through five- and 15-minute crypto contracts rather than capital locked in year-long political outcomes.
Dudas’s conclusion is behavioral rather than philosophical: “We just had to adapt to the reality of how people behave on blockchain.” Consumers attracted by liquid, low-fee systems generally do not exhibit the multi-year holding periods that tokenized games and governance communities assumed.
The other side of the barbell is stablecoin and money-market infrastructure. Squads supports business-to-business payments and multisignature operations on Solana; Dakota provides stablecoin infrastructure for large enterprises; protocols such as Kamino give users access to yield and borrowing products unavailable through Vanguard or Morgan Stanley accounts.
Social trading remains an immature bridge between those poles. On Pump’s app, FOMO, and similar products, sophisticated traders can enter before broad distribution and trade with size or privileged knowledge; Logan found that his own $100 experiment went nowhere. Some platforms add extreme slippage, making them poor retail products even when the interface feels accessible.
5. Meme-driven acquisition must eventually graduate into better assets
Platforms tell investors that meme coins are merely an acquisition funnel: attract users with volatility, then retain them through stocks and higher-quality products. Dudas understands the skepticism because “we haven’t seen this yet,” but insists the transition must occur: “You can’t let your customers lose money,” and there is no infinite supply of replacement customers.
“Stock memes” are an awkward intermediate form—users buy a meme token to receive stock exposure over time. To Dudas, that crypto-specific wrapper shows progress from pure memes toward quality assets, but the end state is copy-trading and holding better assets for longer.
The strongest immediate benefit may be outside the US. Downloadable apps can provide stablecoins, public equities, pre-IPO exposure, and crypto assets to people who otherwise lack convenient access; as Dudas puts it, users often value “access over form” and tolerate synthetic structures or inefficiencies to reach compelling markets.
Logan offered stablecoins as the precedent: exporting digital dollars eventually pushed banks and governments to improve their own products. Tokenized US capital markets could exert the same pressure, while multiple competing super-apps—Pump, FOMO, Jupiter, Phantom, Robinhood, and others—differentiate through brand, geography, or their strongest asset category.
6. Applications are abstracting chains while Ethereum’s asset story weakens
Dudas currently views Solana as the default permissionless venue for spot assets because it combines breadth and liquidity, while Hyperliquid leads onchain perpetuals; Lighter is another EVM-based alternative. Solana could extend from spot into derivatives, but established liquidity and user habits, not ideological allegiance, determine where trading happens.
Most retail users may not know—or care—which chain an application uses. Someone clicking a TikTok advertisement sees the asset and interface, while wallets and settlement disappear behind the product. Dudas calls this abstraction optimistic because earlier applications forced users to assemble an unusable stack themselves.
Base and the Robinhood network have strong teams and institutional distribution; Solana’s lack of a controlling exchange or corporation is, in Dudas’s words, “a feature, not a bug.” He expects several networks to persist because each already hosts credible teams serving distinct consumer, DeFi, stablecoin, and trading markets.
His bearish exception is ETH as an asset: it has occupied a “murky middle ground” and failed for five years to articulate why holders should own it. Both speakers credit Ethereum with originating most crypto innovation despite punishing fees and awkward transactions, but argue that users ultimately chose functional products, while L2 growth did not clearly translate into ETH value accrual.
7. Value-accruing tokens can win as infrastructure memes diverge toward zero
For projects combining equity and tokens, Dudas demands either a clear choice or genuine complementarity. Pump.fun has both and, according to him, directed more than $400 million into token buybacks and burns over roughly 14 months; he says half of the money is now going to an equity fund to promote growth. The structure remains unresolved: holders must trust the company to succeed and ultimately make value or fees accrue to the token.
Other experiments include Venice’s VVV utility token and Backpack’s proposed path from tokens into shares. Their precise long-term outcomes remain uncertain, but the governing question is consistent: if equity captures value, “how any value that accrues to the equity will then flow back to the token holders?”
Governance alone is insufficient. When teams and early investors own most votes and can direct fees toward equity, token holders are left “at the discretion of the founders and early investors.” Dudas argues many L2 and infrastructure tokens were primarily liquidity-extraction mechanisms; founders who remained for years, including Uniswap’s Hayden Adams and Aave’s Stani Kulechov, are exceptions deserving respect.
The closing call is simultaneous bull and bear. Dudas expects “relentlessly better assets,” liquidity, ramps, invisible wallets, and machine participants to expand application-layer value over five years, but predicts fewer tokens will succeed. XRP, Cardano, and inactive alternative L1s are framed as memes detached from transaction volume; some could fall permanently as exchanges eventually delist stagnant, high-cap assets that repeatedly lose customers money.
AI broadens that application thesis rather than replacing it. Bitcoin converted “energy into money”; data centers now convert “energy into intelligence,” drawing miners and crypto infrastructure operators into compute markets. 6MV expects to be “dragged into AI” through open-source models, stablecoin payments, machine lending, and agent-controlled capital while avoiding robot-training bets where it lacks an edge.
Jastremski remains bullish on crypto and AI separately but sees little proven traction at their intersection beyond crypto becoming the financial backbone. Dudas expects equities to capture the value of many AI businesses and hopes that equity will be tokenized later, while crypto’s durable advantage remains market structure, access, and moving money.