A New Name at Valeon: Qawi Jalili
Today marks an addition to the Valeon team worth writing about properly rather than folding into a changelog. Qawi Jalili has joined us, and by the time you're reading this he has already left fingerprints on Plutarc that matter more than any title ever could.
Qawi's background is in sales and marketing, sharpened inside the crypto space long enough that he moves through it the way a fish moves through water. He's comfortable with the volatility, fluent in the jargon, entirely unbothered by market conditions that would rattle most people. He carries the kind of confidence and charisma that businesses spend fortunes trying to manufacture and rarely succeed at buying.
What's easy to miss in a title like "Head of Marketing and Business Operations" is the practical debt sitting underneath it. Qawi handed over the API keys needed to push Plutarc's adapter development forward on exchanges I couldn't otherwise touch, and that access is the reason six of Plutarc's now-eleven adapters are live-validated and standing ready: Bybit, Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and — newest of the group — Bitget, added this cycle and run through the same live-test playbook as the rest, with results just as strong. Worth stating plainly here, since it's easy to misread as a product gap rather than what it actually is: the UK KYC gate is a constraint on my own ability to live-validate adapters in dev and QA, not a block on customer access — all eleven adapters are already built from spec. Qawi's keys are what let that validation work happen on exchanges where my own hands are tied. Thank you, Qawi.
And the access kept paying off past the initial unlock. Liquidity, market depth, and the sheer volume of exchange-side activity on these six made for a genuinely different live environment than anything tested against before, and the results are worth writing down honestly rather than glossed over.
The fast clock traded hard. Once the self-throttled execution bug from the last post got fixed, the bot stopped holding itself back and ran at what turns out to be its actual floor — confirming the cadence flagged as a lower bound then was real, not theoretical. Bybit in particular came back with WebSocket latencies as low as 2 milliseconds, helped by native order placement over the socket rather than falling back to REST.
The dev strategy running underneath all this was never built to make money — it exists to exercise the bot's logical paths, nothing more. So it's worth flagging plainly that in liquid conditions it still closed some trades in the green. That has to be reported as PnL before fees, and the distinction matters more than it sounds: every trader's fee environment is their own, shaped by account tier and volume, and exchanges routinely cut fees directly for accounts trading at high frequency. A strategy placing 30 to 60 trades a minute lives or dies on exactly that discount — at that cadence, the fee schedule is the difference between a strategy that's profitable and one that only looks like it on paper.
Going forward, Qawi takes on the Head of Marketing and Business Operations role for Plutarc, and the mandate doesn't stop there. It covers everything under the Valeon stack — VocaSync, Gramatic, OEMI, and whatever comes next.
One honest note belongs in this post rather than outside it. Plutarc is still bootstrapped by a solo founder whose primary income comes from driving for Amazon Flex, so I'm not in a position to pay anyone a proper salary right now, Qawi included. He's joined without one, for now, on the strength of where this is headed rather than what it pays today. That won't stay true forever, and it says something about the team being built here that someone is willing to bet on that trajectory before the numbers catch up.