Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) is the team building Buttonwood Bonds, an on-chain market for long-term debt. We’re the first team to build a liquidation-free debt market, unlocking safe DeFi borrowing for the vast majority of users.
Money markets have three core components—short-term debt (demand-deposit markets), exchanges, and long-term debt (bonds). DeFi today has exchanges and short-term lending with scale, as evidenced by the size of Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. But long-term lending is still missing.
Long-term debt is non-callable debt. This means freedom from margin calls and liquidations. For example, a drop in the value of your home does not trigger the liquidation of your house—rather, only multiple missed payments can bring the house into foreclosure. In contrast, short-term debt can lead to liquidations during times of high volatility.
The Buttonwood Foundation’s mission is to grow both the web3 bond market and a new generation of decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments—including fiat-free stablecoins, yield splitters, and long/short options. Our projects are composed of simple, open contracts—we seek not to build a platform or walled garden, but a set of tools open to all.
The Buttonwood Foundation is backed by True Ventures, Framework Ventures, BlockTower Capital, NfX, Bitfinex/Tether, Mechanism Capital, Bixin, Founders Collective, and numerous DeFi founders (including from Coingecko, Balancer, Cozy, Syndicate, and many more).
You will be our first Design hire. We are looking for a UX designer to create user flows, drive end-to-end designs, and distill financial complexity into beautiful, logical interfaces. You are curious to understand how financial instruments work and excited to improve on what they are capable of doing.
You will participate in every stage of a fast-paced design and build process – from research, journey mapping, user flows, and exploratory design sprints, to wire-framing, prototyping, delivery of high-fidelity designs, and iteration with product and engineering through the development process.
You will play a critical role in bringing Buttonwood’s lending markets to the world. Come build the bond market with us!
Please send an email to matthew@prl.one with 100% of the following if you wish to be considered for this role:
We look forward to hearing from you!