Daniel Malinovski on Macro Crypto Economics at Zebu Live

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, spoke on the Macro Crypto Economics panel at Zebu Live in London on 5 and 6 October 2023.

Zebu Live is the UK's largest Web3 conference, and the 2023 edition drew more than 3,000 attendees and over 150 VC investors, with another 10,000 watching the stream. The panel put Daniel alongside Ethan Pierse of NFT Factory Paris, Lex Sokolin of Generative Ventures, Mohamed Ezeldin of Animoca Brands, and Yaroslav Writtle of Faculty Group.

What the panel covered

Macro Crypto Economics is a broad title, and the discussion moved between two things that are usually treated separately: what rates, liquidity and institutional flows do to digital asset markets, and what individual token economies can control from the inside.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A founder cannot do anything about the cost of capital, but the design decisions inside a token economy determine how much of a macro shock actually reaches the protocol. A model that pays emissions to mercenary liquidity loses that liquidity the moment yields elsewhere improve, whereas a model where the token is required to use the product keeps demand tied to usage rather than to the rate environment.

Why this sat with the rest of the panel

The panel deliberately mixed perspectives. Generative Ventures and Faculty Group brought the investor and institutional read, Animoca and NFT Factory brought consumer and cultural distribution, and Simplicity brought the token design side. Panels on macro tend to stay at the level of charts and Fed commentary, and the more useful version of the conversation is the one that connects those conditions back to decisions a founder can still make: supply schedule, emissions, unlock timing, and whether a token belongs in the model at all.

Zebu Live 2023 ran across two days in London, backed by Google, Solana, Tezos, Animoca Brands, Binance and Coinbase among others.