How to Build Solid Tokenomics, with DWF Labs

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, presented "How to Build Solid Tokenomics" in a webinar with DWF Labs on 27 November 2025 at 11am UTC.

The session covered three things: tokenomics fundamentals, a live token economy design worked through on screen, and why token launches fail. DWF Labs is one of the more active market makers and multi-stage investors in digital assets, which put the discussion in front of an audience that sees the consequences of a weak model from the liquidity side rather than the design side.

Designing live rather than presenting slides

The middle section was the reason to do the webinar at all. Building a token economy in front of an audience exposes the decisions that a finished deck hides: what the supply cap is chosen against, why the allocation splits where it does, what happens to the emission curve when one assumption about user behaviour changes.

Most published tokenomics documents present outputs. The percentages are there, the vesting chart is there, and the reasoning that produced them is not, which is why so many of them look reasonable and behave badly.

Why launches fail

The failure modes cluster into a short list, and almost none of them are about the token itself.

Supply arriving faster than demand is the most common. A protocol with a twelve-month cliff followed by linear vesting concentrates a large release into a single quarter, and if fee revenue has not grown to meet it by then the only buyers are speculative.

The second is a token with no job. If the product works identically whether or not a user holds the token, the token is priced on sentiment, and sentiment is not a demand source anyone can plan around.

The third is market maker terms agreed without understanding them. Loan-and-option structures give a market maker a position that pays when the token falls, and a founder who signs one without modelling the outcome has introduced a seller into their own launch.

Simplicity Group runs tokenomics design, audits and Machinations modelling for funded businesses, alongside its go-to-market practice. The DWF Labs webinar ran on 27 November 2025.