Sustainable Tokenomics Design at Network School

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, ran a workshop on Sustainable Tokenomics Design for the Foundation Ventures Mini Accelerator, hosted at Network School on Wednesday 19 November 2025 at 9am GMT+8.

Network School is Balaji Srinivasan's residential programme, where members live on a single campus and build startups under a structured daily routine of learning, fitness and shipping. The Foundation Ventures Mini Accelerator runs inside it, giving resident teams a compressed programme with external mentors.

What "sustainable" means in practice

Most tokenomics presentations describe a model that works on the day it launches. The harder question is what the same model does in month eighteen, when the seed allocation starts unlocking and the emissions that bootstrapped the first users are still running.

The workshop worked through that arithmetic directly. If a protocol pays out more in emissions each month than it takes in through fees, the difference is funded by new buyers, and a design that depends on continuous new buyers is a design with an expiry date attached. Sustainability is the point where fee revenue covers the incentives the protocol still needs to pay, and the useful exercise is calculating when that crossover happens rather than asserting that it will.

The design decisions that determine it

Three choices set that date. The emission curve determines how fast supply enters circulation, the sink design determines how much of it leaves again, and the vesting schedule determines whether early holders are selling into the same window.

Teams tend to set all three separately, then discover they interact. An aggressive emission schedule paired with a twelve-month cliff concentrates supply pressure in one quarter, whereas the same emissions against a longer linear vest spreads it thin enough for organic demand to absorb. The model is the same; the outcome is not.

Simplicity Group runs tokenomics design, audits and Machinations simulation for funded businesses. The workshop was hosted at Network School on 19 November 2025.