Mike Dudas, co-founder of crypto venture firm 6th Man Ventures, said Solana is positioned to attract mainstream users because it supports trading, payments, and settlement on a single network—and argued that corporate-backed chains such as Coinbase's Base and Robinhood Chain face structural pressure to steer users toward fee-generating products.

His comments come as Solana validators consider proposals to slow token issuance and burn more SOL.

Solana could bring hundreds of millions of people into crypto without most of them ever realizing they are using a blockchain, Dudas said on a recent episode of Decrypt's Fomo Hour podcast.

Dudas, who previously founded crypto news outlet The Block before moving into venture investing, is an early backer of Pump.fun—a Solana-based platform for creating tokens that has ranked among the network's largest fee generators—and various other Solana projects. He said the network's advantage lies in the breadth of activity it supports, a breadth reflected in Solana's regular standing among the busiest blockchains by transaction activity.

"The reason I think Solana is in a great position is because it is sort of the everything chain of trading and money movement and settlement," he told Decrypt. "So it's performant, it's flexible, and it's multi-use case."

Consumer apps, Dudas said, have made crypto easier to use by hiding many of its technical elements. Users can now fund accounts through services such as Apple Pay without handling wallets or interacting directly with a blockchain. The shift parallels broader moves by payments and fintech firms, including PayPal and Stripe, which have added crypto and stablecoin features to their own apps in recent years.

Today we sat down with @mdudas to chat about @solana and its ecosystem!

3:30 - Solana's place this cycle
7:10 - Thoughts on the latest Solana Governance vote
8:40 - Are Memecoins back?
14:40 - El Toad Pepe backstory
18:07 - How to make a memecoin a "good coin" ?
21:05 - The… pic.twitter.com/zR7LewjEll

— Decrypt (@DecryptMedia) August 12, 2026

"I think that's how most people are going to experience 'on-chain' moving forward," he said.

Solana's less visible infrastructure—including round-the-clock availability, deep liquidity, low fees, and near-instant settlement—is what makes those consumer products possible, Dudas argued.

"The unsexy stuff enables the stuff that people use," he said.

Corporate-backed blockchains face different pressures, Dudas said, pointing to Coinbase's Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network the exchange launched in 2023, and Robinhood Chain, the brokerage's planned network for tokenized assets that is being built on Arbitrum's technology. Both companies, he argued, have an incentive to direct users toward products that generate revenue.

Dudas also said he supports efforts to reduce Solana's token issuance—a topic making the rounds of late as calls to reduce inflation intensify across both the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems.

"The notion that you need massive amounts of inflation for security has been overdone," he said, calling the latest proposal "reasonable."

Solana validators are considering two measures bundled under SGP-0003. The proposals would accelerate reductions in new SOL issuance and increase the amount of SOL burned through network fees, and they would take effect only if approved in the validator vote. If adopted, the changes could produce the kind of supply squeeze that investors would likely benefit from, assuming demand holds steady or increases.

Dudas said Solana's meme coin ecosystem also proved more resilient than much of the crypto market during the downturn, arguing that the network's willingness to support uses ranging from speculative tokens to stock trading has become one of its strengths. The latter now includes tokenized-stock products that firms such as Backed Finance launched on Solana in 2025.

"The beauty of Solana is that the chain supports all of these different use cases," he said. "As much crap as the Solana Foundation gets, and as much crap as I sometimes give it, they unequivocally and vocally support all of these broad use cases—and you can see it."