--- title: 'Head of Institutional Growth at Whetstone Research' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-institutional-growth-whetstone-research-united-states-tx48e28mrgdy' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-16' --- # Head of Institutional Growth at Whetstone Research - **Company:** Whetstone Research - **Location:** United States - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-05-25 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/whetstoneresearch/1ecb13da-32a8-497d-bef7-62d97de81050 ## Job description ## About the role This role will be the first BD and Growth hire at Whetstone Research. ## Responsibilities - Lead institutional growth for [Doppler](http://doppler.lol) - sales, BD, and the strategic relationships that turn warm intros into bespoke production deployments - Build Whetstone's institutional surface: funds, asset managers, banks, fintechs, and corporates that want to bring or use assets onchain. - Be the translation layer between institutional buyers and our protocol teams - feeding product, integration, and regulatory signals back so we build what the market actually needs - Help us know what we don't know. Which institutional segments are shipping next, which are noise, and where should we be skating to? ## What we're looking for We believe that the time for Institutions to come onchain is here. After a decade of whitepapers and pilots, institutions are finally getting serious. BlackRock, Apollo, Franklin Templeton, JPM, Fidelity, and dozens of others have moved from "exploring" to live deployments. Within the next 24 months many of these organizations will decide which protocols and infra the billions or even trillions behind them actually settle on. We want someone who already lives at that intersection and wants to own Doppler's seat at the table. You probably have a warm rolodex inside one or more of: the digital assets desks at major banks (JPM, GS, BNY, Citi), crypto-native institutional players (Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, BitGo, Anchorage, Coinbase Institutional), the tokenization teams at TradFi asset managers (Apollo, Hamilton Lane, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree), or the new infra layer (Securitize, Ondo, Superstate, Figure). You understand why Doppler's novel approach to protocol design matters to a treasurer thinking about a tokenized bond just as much as to a coin launch on Zora - and ideally, you can hold a credible conversation about settlement risk with a CIO in the morning and MEV with a protocol team in the afternoon. Even better if you've previously built an institutional book from zero at another crypto-native company, or led the digital assets push inside a TradFi institution and are now ready to do it onchain for real. You're comfortable being a player-coach for the first 6 months - running the meetings, writing the memos, closing the deals yourself - before building the team around you. Generally, we hope that you love this industry as much as we do, that you've been watching tokenization mature long enough to know the difference between the real deals and the theater, and that you're as terminally online as we are. ## About Whetstone Research Whetstone Research is focused on designing and building new protocols that accelerate the future of onchain markets. The team is less than 15 people with deep hands on experience in the blockchain industry; previously at Uniswap, AAVE, Aztec, Hedera, and other household big tech names like Google, Amazon, or LinkedIn. We build Doppler - custom market infrastructure for new asset classes. Doppler has created over 14 million new digital assets that have done over $2 billion in lifetime trading volume. Let's build the future of onchain markets together. ## About Whetstone Research ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Whetstone Research is building the future of onchain markets, with its first product being Doppler, a hyper-efficient price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping protocol. - **Entity Type**: Private (Startup) - **Headquarters**: Remote (United States, with team members across 7 locations) - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Austin Adams (Former Protocols at Uniswap), Matt Czernik (Former Protocols at Primitive), Clement Lakhal (Former Protocols at Primitive), Cooper Kunz (Former Product at Aztec) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Blockchain Infrastructure, Onchain Markets - **Target customers**: B2B & B2C – Liquidity providers, traders, DeFi protocols, and institutional market participants - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Building the future of onchain markets" – focused on creating hyper-efficient price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping for blockchain-based assets. ## Products & Services - **Doppler Protocol**: A hyper-efficient price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping protocol. It is the company’s flagship product, designed to improve how new tokens are priced and launched onchain. - **Doppler SDK (TypeScript)**: A software development kit for developers to interact with and integrate the Doppler protocol into their own applications. - **Doppler v3/v4 Mini Apps**: Reference implementations and interfaces built on top of the Doppler protocol, serving as examples for frontend development. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private startup) - **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Not publicly disclosed; the company is early-stage (founded 2024) with a small team (approximately 12 employees as of latest data). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed, but the founding team hails from leading DeFi protocols: **Uniswap** (Austin Adams), **Primitive** (Matt Czernik, Clement Lakhal), and **Aztec** (Cooper Kunz). - **Growth Signals**: - Active development with 18 public GitHub repositories and multiple active codebases (Doppler core, SDKs, mini apps). - Doppler core contracts have garnered 98 stars on GitHub, indicating community interest. - Hiring for key roles (Frontend Engineer, Backend Engineer, Marketing Lead, Head of Institutional Growth) suggests scaling ambitions. - Remote-first with a distributed team across 7 locations in the United States. ## Competitive Advantages - **Founding Team’s Deep DeFi Expertise**: The team has direct experience building at Uniswap (the largest DEX), Primitive (a pioneering AMM protocol), and Aztec (a privacy-focused zk-rollup), giving them unique insight into onchain market mechanics. - **First-Mover in Hyper-Efficient Price Discovery**: Doppler targets a specific pain point in DeFi – inefficient price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping for new tokens – an area where existing solutions (like traditional bonding curves) have limitations. - **Open-Source, Community-Driven Approach**: The company publishes its core contracts, SDKs, and reference implementations publicly on GitHub, fostering developer trust and ecosystem adoption. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Launching and refining the Doppler protocol, growing the developer ecosystem around Doppler SDKs, and expanding institutional adoption (as evidenced by the "Head of Institutional Growth" role). - **Direction for growth**: Scaling from a research-driven team to a full product organization, expanding the team across engineering, marketing, and institutional sales, and establishing Doppler as the standard for onchain price discovery. ## Why Work Here - **Culture highlights**: Deeply technical, research-driven environment focused on cutting-edge DeFi/blockchain problems. The team is small (~12 people), offering high ownership and impact. - **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Fully remote-first, with team members distributed across 7 US locations. Employees work remotely, with no central office. - **Notable perks or engineering culture**: - Work with a founding team from Uniswap, Primitive, and Aztec – top-tier DeFi protocols. - Opportunity to shape the future of onchain markets from the ground up. - Open-source culture – all core work is public, encouraging transparency and collaboration. - Roles include both engineering (Frontend, Backend) and non-engineering (Marketing, Institutional Growth), catering to diverse skill sets. ## Sources 1. [whetstone.cc](https://whetstone.cc/) 2. [whetstone.cc/team](https://whetstone.cc/team.html) 3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/whetstoneresearch](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/whetstoneresearch) 4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/whetstone-research) 5. [github.com/whetstoneresearch](https://github.com/whetstoneresearch) ## Other roles at Whetstone Research - [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-whetstone-research-remote-mmbedvyscj49) - [Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-lead-whetstone-research-global-cq40xztvd3jt) — Global - [Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-whetstone-research-global-g405mpfq2vch) — Global - [Frontend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/frontend-engineer-whetstone-research-global-g9jahbwxa13c) — Global