Daniel Malinovski Mentors at Solana Summit 20x20

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, joined Solana Summit APAC 20x20 in Da Nang as a mentor. The summit ran from 5 to 7 June 2025 at Koi Resort and Residence, presented by Mechanism Capital and Foundation Ventures.

Solana Summit is the ecosystem's largest founder and developer conference in Asia-Pacific, run as a not-for-profit event that rotates around the region. The 2025 edition carried more than 100 speakers and workshops, a hackathon with a demo day, and a dedicated DePIN mini summit on the final day. The previous edition drew over 1,000 people from 56 countries.

What 20x20 is

20x20 is the mentor format inside the summit: twenty mentors matched to twenty teams for focused sessions rather than stage time. The format exists because conference talks and founder problems rarely line up. A talk has to be general enough for a room, whereas the thing blocking a specific team is usually narrow, awkward and not something they would ask in public.

Daniel's sessions covered token design and go-to-market. Across APAC teams the same two questions came up: how to structure a raise that includes both equity and tokens without the two working against each other, and how to reach users outside the region they launched in.

The equity and token problem

The first question has a mechanism worth stating plainly. Equity investors are paid when the company is sold or listed, so they want value concentrated in the entity, whereas token holders are paid through the token, so they want value routed to the protocol. A cap table and a token allocation that were designed separately end up pulling revenue in two directions, and the disagreement surfaces at the worst possible moment, which is usually the first major unlock.

The work is to decide upfront where value accrues and to write the raise around that decision, rather than closing an equity round and bolting a token model on afterwards.

Solana Summit APAC 2025 ran from 5 to 7 June in Da Nang, Vietnam.