6MV Founder: In 2026, the "landmark turning point" for crypto investment has arrived

Organized & Compiled by: Ada, Deep Tide TechFlow

Guest: Mike Dudas, Founder and Managing Partner of 6th Man Ventures (6MV), Founder of The Block, former executive at Venmo/Braintree/PayPal

Host: Robbie Klages

Podcast Source: The Rollup

Original Title: Why 2026 Will Be An Iconic Year to Invest in Digital Assets

Broadcast Date: April 24, 2026

Editor's Introduction

In this year's annual interview summarizing the crypto VC landscape, this episode of The Rollup invites Mike Dudas, founder of 6th Man Ventures. He believes the crypto market is in a contradictory phase of "rapidly improving fundamentals but constant negative events." At the same time, he made a clear judgment on the stablecoin landscape: Circle is essentially "government dollars," and refusing to freeze funds during the Bybit hacking incident was a historical mistake; Tether has undergone a transformation and far exceeds Circle in key decisions. Companies like Paxos and Bridge will become the next batch of large fintech enterprises. Additionally, he revealed that Pump.fun has an annual revenue close to $400 million and believes its token is severely undervalued.

Key Quotes

Current State of Crypto VC Market

• "I am deploying funds in 2026, so I will tell you this is the best year in history."
• "The current market is not lacking in capital, founders, ideas, or users, but unexpected events happen every week, like the next hacking attack, the next regulatory bad news, or the next person getting arrested."
• "We see top talent flocking to mediocre ideas or consensus ideas at an unprecedented rate. The reason VCs are not deploying funds is that they keep receiving the same pitch."

Pump.fun and On-chain Consumption

• "Pump.fun is still averaging over $1 million in daily revenue in the current market environment, with an annual revenue close to $400 million. You can't say this market has peaked."
• "The crypto market does not reward fundamentals. It's not that people don't care about fundamentals, but we haven't figured out what kind of fundamentals are important. Tokens are too new; they mean a million different things."
• "Everyone says meme coins are over. But the marginal retail investors who care about meme coins are not present right now. Those people will come back."

Circle vs. Tether

• "Circle's strategy is clear: as close to central bank digital currency as possible. They are basically saying: government, we are completely on your side; your tracks are our tracks."
• "If North Korea is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and you have the ability to stop it, you should stop it. Circle is on the wrong side of history, and they will pay for it."
• "When it comes to key decisions, the gap between Tether and Circle is not the difference between a professional team and an amateur team; it's the difference between an NFL professional team and a high school football team."

The Dilemma of New Chains, Application Chains, and General Chains

• "Mega ETH seems more like an application chain to me; it will become a super application. I don't really believe you can value Monad in the same way as Solana; it depends on the application revenue on top."
• "Solana has not clearly expressed why I should use a general public chain for settlement. Is it for censorship resistance, speed, or cost reduction? To be honest, I'm less certain about this story than I was a year ago."

Stablecoins as a Service

• "Every company with users and funds should put their money into stablecoins backed by government bonds. They haven't done this yet, but they will. They won't go get licenses to issue dollars themselves. So this is a huge market for a few stablecoin-as-a-service providers."

AI, IPOs, and Liquidity Cycles

• "No one cares about crypto company IPOs right now. To be honest, they are focused on SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the room."
• "The Trump meme coin is the peak; two years later is 2027, coinciding with the IPOs of this batch of companies and the four-year cycle. That time window will see a group of people holding low-cost shares in crypto companies gain liquidity, many of whom have a natural interest in crypto."

Current State of Crypto VC and Capital Flows

Robbie: This is our annual summary of the state of crypto VC. Last year, when we did this in Soho, the market was completely different. We previously had Tom Dunleavy from Variant Capital, whose big framework was: VC funding is decreasing, the number of financing rounds is declining, and quality teams are becoming fewer; the whole world has changed. But my thought at the time was: if you have capital and can identify good founders, then competition is actually less, and many new founders are entering the space, possibly with better backgrounds than the last batch. We ultimately reached a consensus that 2025-2026 could be one of the best years for returns. Do you agree? What do you think of the overall state of these founders now?

Mike Dudas:

I am a venture capitalist, and I am deploying funds in 2026, so of course, I will tell you this is the best year in history. But LPs should pay attention.

First, the capital in the crypto VC market is abundant. Several large funds have completed fundraising, and everyone has seen the announcements. Many early-stage funds have also closed but have not publicly announced it. There is a lot of capital waiting to be deployed; capital is not the issue.

The second point is, are there good founders? The answer is yes. Are there good ideas? Of course, you can see a batch of groundbreaking protocols, many of which were founded years ago or even during bear market cycles. So there are ideas, founders, and capital; this is definitely not a pessimistic time for crypto.

But what is the problem? Various explosions keep happening: hacking attacks, founders being charged and arrested for various crimes, the Trump family-related matters looking increasingly suspicious, and the regulatory environment in Washington: we originally expected bills to have passed or be close to passing, but they haven't.

So the current situation is: the macro level of the crypto industry keeps having issues, but at the same time, the fundamentals are rapidly improving. There is no lack of capital, founders, ideas, or usage, but unexpected events happen every week.

Robbie: So has competition decreased when you are making deals?

Mike Dudas:

Yes. Consensus deals are hotter than ever, and prices are being pushed very high; I would say irrationally high. Of course, there is always a last buyer, and looking back five years from now, some of those bids may seem incredible.

But the difficulty is that, although there are good founders, they currently lack the confidence to take big risks. Changes in the external world and within crypto are happening too quickly. When we assess talent, the empirical data we see is that top talent is flocking to less good ideas or consensus ideas at an unprecedented rate.

That’s why you see the speed of VC deployment slowing down. VCs have a higher perspective and can see a lot, but they keep receiving the same pitch, making it hard to distinguish who is truly excellent. There hasn't been that kind of crazy, eye-catching founder, nor has there been marginal innovation that inspires people to take risks. A classic example is: there are no marginal retail buyers, and no blockbuster consumer application has emerged to motivate everyone.

So on the surface, the market lacks inspiration. But at the underlying level? The issuance of stablecoins continues to grow, and the on-chain usage globally is astonishing; it’s just that these are not the focus of media reports. Venture capital is flowing into these companies, not those making headlines, but a large number of startups building on public chains.

Robbie: Indeed, the flow of funds is clearly shifting. Companies at the intersection of on-chain finance and traditional finance are attracting a lot of capital. The number of tokenized companies, stablecoin companies, on-chain credit, and new digital banks is exploding. Where do you see specific investment opportunities at the boundary of these two worlds merging? Is it in clearly compressible profit margins? Or in shortened settlement times?

Mike Dudas:

We are focused on what is entirely new and truly inventive across the spectrum. This is the DNA of 6MV; we prefer on-chain native things.

When Venmo first came out, everyone thought it was an alien product. When Polymarket first entered the Asian market, it also seemed like an alien product, taking six years to become the mainstream consensus it is today. So what we are looking for are those "alien ideas" in the market you mentioned because we believe they will become mainstream in a few years.

The challenge is that, many times, the way to enter these markets is still through regulatory arbitrage. For example, launching oil on Hyperliquid could become the most liquid market because anyone in the world can participate in trading, and market makers don’t have to worry about CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) regulation.

At the VC investment stage, because the CLARITY Act has not been finalized, the situation is very chaotic. Many emerging entrepreneurs are hesitating about how to go down the compliance route. Companies that went down the compliance route too early in past cycles were often punished by competitors.

For example: now there are a bunch of companies doing private equity tokenization, like tokenizing shares of Anthropic. Some structures are relatively standard, while others are just going YOLO, and the YOLO batch is currently growing faster. I am not sure and do not believe this model is sustainable.

So this merging period is indeed very chaotic. We still tend to look for "alien ideas," but when you talk about traditional asset classes, like stocks and structured private credit, these things need big brand endorsements, and our "alien model" doesn’t apply well. Frankly, at the earliest stages, we haven’t seen much capital entering RWA issuance and tokenization companies.

The Misunderstood Value of Pumpfun and Hyperliquid

Robbie: You have always had a strong investment direction in on-chain consumption, doing many deals in this category, with Pump.fun being the most famous. I saw you tweeted that they are absorbing selling pressure like crazy but the market is not responding. There is a counterpoint in the market that is now somewhat of a consensus: the token launch market will not grow like the perpetual contract market, so Pump.fun's buyback or economic model should not be valued like Hyperliquid, because perpetual contracts may be a huge category, while the on-chain token launch market may have peaked. Why is this viewpoint wrong?

Mike Dudas:

I don't even want to debate this; it’s just wrong. You can't see it now because we are in a brutal bear market. In this environment, there are still people launching tokens, and Pump.fun is averaging over $1 million in daily revenue, with an annual revenue close to $400 million.

The more interesting question is, if that's the case, why hasn’t the token price reflected this two-year revenue record and nearly a year of buyback records?

I think part of the reason is the team's communication strategy; they do not do traditional investor relations and do not explain to the market how strong and defensive their business is. I understand their team but don’t really like their stance. At the same time, I understand why they don’t do IR because the crypto market does not reward fundamentals.

To dig deeper, it’s not that people don’t care about fundamentals; it’s that we haven’t figured out what kind of fundamentals are important. Stocks as an asset class have valuation systems that have been around for decades. Bonds have clear, predictable frameworks. And tokens? They are very new, with no standards, and mean completely different things to different people.

So fundamental investors looking at Pump.fun's token, or even Hyperliquid's token HYPE, have no idea how to value them. The result is that these things trade at significant discounts, which makes sense in a bear market, but if Pump.fun continues to deliver, when the bull market comes, it will reflexively swing in the other direction.

As for whether Pump.fun's business is sustainable, I think it is actually more defensive than many businesses. Look at Hyperliquid; the best companies in the world are trying to compete with it, and perpetual contracts are already an extremely consensus opportunity. Everyone agrees that perpetual contracts are a superior way to express asset views, and the prediction market will eventually converge in that direction. But precisely because everyone agrees, competition will be extremely fierce. Whether profits ultimately lie in execution or market-making is still uncertain.

Pump.fun is different. Everyone says meme coins are over and completely out of style. Anything on-chain is not favored right now. And they haven't publicly launched many new things in the past year. But I believe the reason is that the marginal users who care about their product are not in the crypto market right now, but they will come back.

Views on Hot Projects

Robbie: So you are still firmly optimistic that the direction of on-chain consumption will continue to grow. MegaETH (an Ethereum L2 focused on extreme performance) just announced a token launch on April 30, and there are many interesting gamified primitives around it. There is now an interesting divergence: on one side are products like MegaETH and Pump.fun that are still optimizing for retail users on-chain, while on the other side are tokenized assets, RWA, and large institutions entering the space, believing this is the future of the industry. Only a few chains and protocols are still serving more retail-focused on-chain users. What do you think of this divergence?

Mike Dudas:

Specifically regarding MegaETH, I quite like them. But the Ethereum L2 track overall is not an investment logic I can understand, and objectively it hasn't performed well.

I guess MegaETH will eventually become a super application, with the brand being MegaETH, where people use various things on it, creating a flywheel effect. This is somewhat like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid itself is a brand, an application, and the trading activity on it feeds back into the underlying chain. But this is a different positioning from general chains like Solana and Ethereum.

When it comes to new L1s, maybe there will be some L1 that makes crazy innovations, like quantum computing, or something like Bittensor (a decentralized AI network), but we probably won’t foresee it; we will only think it’s obvious in hindsight.

As for MegaETH, I would probably value it based on application layer revenue rather than infrastructure. I don’t know what applications are on it, but I like the team, and the community looks very active.

Monad (another high-performance EVM-compatible L1 backed by top VCs like Paradigm) is the same. I made an angel investment and really like their team, believing they have created great technology. But I don’t really believe Monad can be priced in the same way as Solana.

Robbie: Is this a matter of timing? Or is it because Solana was in a different era?

Mike Dudas:

Monad's pitch is too similar to Ethereum and Solana; fast, cheap, and aimed at retail chains. Bittensor is completely different. So I think timing is not the main factor; the differentiation in positioning is.

We invested in Plasma (a blockchain centered on stablecoin payments); I believe it will become a super application centered around stablecoins, with a supporting chain around it. This model has value, but it is different from Solana and Ethereum, and it is two different things from Bitcoin.

Robbie: Speaking of Plasma, our fund also invested. Tempo (another stablecoin payment company) recently partnered with DoorDash (one of the largest food delivery platforms in the U.S.) to do Agent payments. A year ago, stablecoin chains were the hottest investment direction, but now the heat has cooled down, yet it is fundamentally different from traditional L1s. What is your investment logic for Plasma?

Mike Dudas:

Plasma, Arc, Tempo, don’t think of them as blockchains; they are fintech companies. In the future, they will be like PayPal, Venmo, or Stripe, concerning merchants, consumers, and other stakeholders choosing whose payment and settlement network to use.

Tempo is a business; don’t think of it through the "blockchain" framework. They are companies like Sequoia and Paradigm, and DoorDash is collaborating with them; the team is extremely impressive. In the short term, fee rates are not important; the key is whether you can get people to transact dollars through your settlement network. Plasma follows the same logic.

Robbie: So you see these companies as payment service companies, earning fees and revenue from transaction volumes based on stablecoin payments.

Mike Dudas:

That's roughly it. But the future will be very different. My partner Carl (who previously worked at Paxos and Google Wallet) and Aaron (who has deeply researched AI and Agent payments) are discussing how people’s ways of trading and paying will be completely different in a few months compared to six months ago. But I really don’t know what it will specifically look like; this is not false modesty.

I can make a safe judgment: AI Agents cannot complete transactions on payment systems programmed 60 years ago. The way we purchase things and express financial preferences will undergo fundamental changes. This is the direction Tempo is betting on, and it’s also why we invested in Plasma.

As for general chains, I think they are now at a dangerous moment. By the way, we haven't mentioned Base (the Ethereum L2 launched by Coinbase). I think Coinbase is indeed struggling and somewhat lost; I’m not quite sure what they are doing.

Solana has also not clearly expressed why I should use a general public chain for settlement. Is it for censorship resistance, speed, or cost reduction? Why is this important for businesses or individuals in Argentina or India? To be honest, I am less certain about this story than I was a year ago.

Now is an extremely fluid and chaotic time; the market feels incoherent to me. You can do an interesting exercise: count how many significant partnership announcements Visa and how many different L1s and L2s have made in the past 24 months, and how many chains MasterCard has collaborated with. It’s completely a flourishing state.

The Competitive Landscape of Circle vs. Tether

Robbie: Indeed, I have been in this industry for about as long as you, and before 2020, such large-scale partnership announcements happened once a quarter or once a year.

Speaking of recent security incidents, first, Drift (a decentralized perpetual contract protocol on Solana) was attacked, followed by cross-chain attacks on Aave and Kelp DAO. The two major stablecoin issuers, Circle and Tether, have taken completely different stances. Circle did not freeze the funds that were bridged from Solana to Ethereum and then mixed away through Tornado Cash. Arbitrum froze 30,000 ETH a few days ago, while Tether froze $344 million worth of USDT related to a criminal organization suspected of everything from pig butchering to human trafficking, which may also be linked to the Lazarus Group (a North Korean government-supported hacking organization).

The performance of these two companies is completely opposite to public expectations. Circle is a publicly traded company, highly compliant, while Tether has always been seen as operating in a gray area. But Circle faced a lot of criticism for not freezing funds, while Tether's freezing of funds was recognized. What do you think of the stablecoin landscape? If the stablecoin supply reaches $1 trillion, will Tether account for 70-80% or will it be more balanced?

Mike Dudas: Circle's strategy is clear: as close to central bank digital currency (CBDC) as possible. They are basically saying, "Government, we are completely on your side. We lobby and go through all compliance processes. If we don’t receive a subpoena, we won’t freeze funds. Your rules are our rules." I may be exaggerating a bit, but Circle is essentially telling this story through their actions and silence. This is entirely consistent with their usual tone. They have never been DeFi native.

Circle will have its place. It can serve as government dollars. Government dollars on the blockchain are better than the experience in my bank account. Circle has won this market, but I believe it is a much smaller market than the entire future market.

The reason is that the boldest people in the world, the entrepreneurs who are creating the future and want to serve these people, will not trust Circle. They will think Circle is tethered to the government. And the best people in the world, those building the largest enterprises and most profitable businesses, trust their own judgment. Circle is not aligned with that spirit. Circle is a bald man in a suit who would rather let a judge tell him what to do to shirk all responsibility than make a key decision to protect customers from losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tether has had conflicts with us in the past, and I need to clarify that. But today’s Tether is completely different from the Tether I had serious issues with seven or eight years ago. Back then, Tether's balance sheet had obvious holes and lacked transparency. They later changed their organization. But what I respect is that they are willing to make difficult decisions.

These companies need to make difficult decisions. To be honest, no one looks at Tether and USDT and says, "This is a decentralized asset." Once you decide to use them, the expectation should be: I might be censored, and my transactions might be interfered with. Based on this premise, in the past month, in handling black-and-white cases, Tether has far outpaced Circle. If North Korea is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and you have the ability to stop it, you should stop it. Circle is on the wrong side of history, and they will pay for it.

Robbie: Is there still room for other stablecoin issuers?

Mike Dudas:

There is definitely room.

First, we have not yet seen any real scaling success with stablecoins outside of the dollar. I believe this will happen.

Second, you will start to see tokens that generate yield in a stable manner, like USDAI. I absolutely believe there will be alternative choices outside of fiat currencies. What excited me about Bitcoin back then will reappear in the form of dollar-denominated, real-world asset-linked options. Of course, many will also be bound to computing power in completely different ways than in the past, like GPU financing.

Robbie: The stablecoin-as-a-service track was extremely hot 18 months ago, but now profit margins seem to be compressing, and initial capital requirements have also risen significantly. What do you think about the path for these companies going forward?

Mike Dudas:

It will be like the blockchain market, first exploding, then consolidating. Dollar stablecoins are likely heading toward a 70-20-10 pattern.

The market is still unclear; should we get an OCC license? Or a license from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS)? Every company on a platform with users and funds should put that money into stablecoins backed by government bonds. But they haven’t done this yet, finding it troublesome and still hesitating.

When they get moving, they won’t go get licenses to issue themselves. So for Bridge, Paxos, and Zero Hash, these stablecoin-as-a-service providers, this is a huge market. Banks won’t do this; it’s not their core business. Moreover, there is a very large, completely undeveloped currency market in the international market.

Robbie: Will Paxos go public?

Mike Dudas:

Good question. I think Paxos is a very valuable company; I have been an advisor to them and spent some time there after selling The Block. It’s a great business. Every cycle attracts the best partners, first Binance, then PayPal, now Charles Schwab, and there are more undisclosed in the pipeline. As for whether Chad (Paxos founder and CEO) wants to be a public company CEO, I don’t know.

The Impact of AI Giants' IPOs on Crypto

Robbie: Kraken has already submitted its IPO application. Last year, near the peak of the cycle, we saw a wave of IPO enthusiasm. What do you think about the significance of crypto companies going public for the industry? Now there are ETFs and various products; why do we need more public companies?

Mike Dudas:

In a market where people are paying attention, this would be great. Coinbase, Circle, and Kraken going public would lead people to say, "What else can we invest in? Alpha is on-chain."

But this is not just a crypto issue; it’s the same for SaaS and consumer tech. AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. No one cares about crypto IPOs. They are focused on SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

But what might benefit crypto is that after these companies go public, many people holding low-cost shares will gain liquidity, and these people overlap significantly with the crypto community. There are many intersections between early crypto and early AI, and of course, some of those people are now in prison, not just SBF.

These companies will go public next year. I can’t tell you whether stock prices will rise or fall; the geopolitical variables are too great. But the key is: the market capitalization of crypto companies is much smaller than those AI giants, and the amount of capital needed to leverage on-chain assets is also much smaller.

Robbie: What do you think the timeline looks like?

Mike Dudas:

The last cycle ended earlier than I expected; I thought it would last until 2026, but it didn’t. The timing of Trump’s election was about the peak, and the Trump meme coin came after that. Pushing two years forward brings us to 2027, coinciding with the IPOs of this batch of companies and the four-year cycle time window.

I think we are in a fairly constructive period now. It’s shocking that despite so much negative news, prices haven’t dropped much. To be honest, I’m quite surprised by this.

Interestingly, the industry is self-rescuing in ways some people consider unhealthy. Tether supports Drift's recovery process, and Arbitrum freezes assets. We can discuss the rightness or wrongness of these practices, but they are stabilizing mechanisms. Most issues in this cycle have occurred on-chain, but the centralized entities that messed everything up in the last cycle are instead stabilizing the on-chain ecosystem. The merging you mentioned is indeed working from a certain perspective.

So will the value ultimately belong to centralized entities or on-chain entities? Regardless, I think looking back, people will say this period was the most widely adopted period for institutions in the industry’s history. The bill has passed, and we have survived the AI IPO craze. Crypto was left behind while everyone chased AI giant IPOs, but by Q4 at the latest, when the AI giants go public, crypto might just be at a low point.

For a while, crypto will be completely overlooked, and I accept that. Then the logic of the bull market is: many people interested in crypto will gain liquidity. Another longer-term bull market logic is whether the emergence of AI Agents and new trading methods means that the crypto market is much larger than it is today. The answer is likely yes.

About Vault

Robbie: Last question. I spoke with Carl about your research related to Vault (on-chain asset management vaults). Aave (the largest decentralized lending protocol) recently had an attack related to its asset pool lending model, involving flaws in Aave's curation model, Layer Zero's security model, and the entire setup of Kelp DAO. This pooled lending model affects all types of users. Vault is very friendly to institutions because they want a way to express credit, initiate new types of credit, or RWA products on-chain that is risk manageable and parameter controllable. Morpho (a decentralized lending optimization protocol) has become the de facto Vault layer. What is the specific thesis you are researching for Vault?

Mike Dudas:

The core issue of Vault is that ordinary people, even institutions, find it difficult to figure out what to invest in on-chain, what the risks are, how to evaluate various assets, and how to rebalance over time. Although the concept of Vault has been hot for the past 18 to 24 months, the level of specialization is far from sufficient.

Morpho's approach is actually very hands-off. It pushes all the difficult decisions onto those listing assets on its platform; I wouldn’t say Morpho is solving problems; more accurately, it is shifting responsibility.

Our portfolio company Upshift just announced a partnership with Securitize (a leading compliance tokenization platform) to conduct NAV (Net Asset Value) analysis for each Vault on the platform, so institutional investors can gain confidence: not just in Upshift's own valuation but also in professional valuations done by independent third parties.

This is not a passive response to recent attack events. Everyone is clear that to attract more dollars into on-chain, Vault is a mechanism: choosing different asset combinations together to start creating structured products. But the past month and a half has sounded the alarm for everyone; the risk management assessments of asset selectors must be upgraded.

In the Aave case, the exchange rate between rETH (Rocket Pool's liquid-staked ETH) and ETH was completely unacceptable relative to its underlying supporting assets. This is no longer a blame-shifting phase; it’s a chain of a series of poor decisions.

What I see now is that the pace of new asset innovation will slow significantly. You will still see large-scale growth, but you won’t see anyone opening a $300 Vault with a weak asset, little collateral, and behind-the-scenes behavior that is also not compliant.

I am very optimistic about the Vault structure, but I am very pessimistic about the past behaviors.

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