About the deskOne adviser
One adviser who reads code and asks awkward questions.
My name is M A Naeli Abdelkarim and Sperfy is my practice. It started in 2019, after a year of fixing the same problems for one employer at a time. Rather than keep doing that inside a single company, I set up a desk other companies could call.
Seven years of the same conversations
Nothing dramatic in the founding story. One engineer, one recurring problem, a room at home and a phone number.
I spent most of 2018 at a Bucharest exchange operator, arguing about key handling with people who would rather not think about it. Before that I ran servers for a telecoms operator, which is where the habit of writing a runbook before anything goes live came from. The first Sperfy client was a Romanian logistics company that wanted to anchor shipping documents on a public chain and needed someone to say whether that was sensible. It half was.
The desk stays at one person on purpose. It means the person who reviews your architecture is the person who answers the phone at the 90 day check back, and that nothing gets handed to a junior you never met. It also means I turn work away, usually two or three enquiries a month, when the calendar is full or the job is closer to law than engineering.
Since 2019 I have worked with 40 or so companies, mostly in Romania, the Netherlands and Germany. Roughly a third of first calls end with me saying the project does not need a blockchain. Better to say that on a free call than three months into an engagement.
Client work since 2019. On site visits run two or three days, the rest happens over shared screens.
Who you actually get
No account manager between you and the person doing the work, because there is only one person. Whoever you speak to on the first call is in the room for the whole engagement.
M A Naeli Abdelkarim
Independent adviser, Bucharest
Six years on exchange backends and telecoms operations before the desk existed. Takes every first call, writes every architecture review and sits in every session. Reads consensus specifications for pleasure, which friends find suspicious.
Node and validator operations
Line B
Monitoring and on-call procedures, then breaking them on purpose to see who gets paged. Strong opinions about standby machines, and no patience for a keystore sitting in two places at once.
Documents you keep
Every engagement
An undocumented change in telecoms earns you a phone call at four in the morning. That lesson stuck. Every engagement ends with diagrams, runbooks and open questions in one file, and every diagram carries a date.
People I bring in
Named before they join
Some jobs need a lawyer, an accountant or a second security reviewer. I work with a handful of specialists in Bucharest and Cluj and name them before anyone joins a call, so you always know who is in the room and who is billing you.
Nobody is subcontracted quietly, and no work leaves the desk without you agreeing to it first.
How sessions run
Shared screen, your keyboard
Your engineers drive. I ask questions, sketch on the whiteboard and write the summary the same evening. Workshops for a whole team run in half day blocks, six to ten people, because a bigger room stops being a conversation.
Working languages
English, Romanian
Sessions run in English by default. Documents can be delivered in Romanian on request, usually with a two day turnaround for the final version.
Office hours are Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 18:00 Eastern European Time. During an active engagement your team also gets a shared channel and a number for genuine emergencies.
Open line for other advisors
If you advise on this too, we should talk.
I refer work out fairly often, usually when a job is mostly legal, mostly accounting or simply outside my hours. If that is your field, or you want a second technical reviewer on a project of yours, call the desk. No fee for the first conversation, and no expectation attached to it.
What the desk is for
Being clear about this saves everyone a phone call.
I advise companies and project teams
Engagements are contracts between your company and my registered practice. I review designs, work through operations with your engineers, run training and write the documents your auditors and counsel will ask for. Your team keeps the systems, the keys and every decision that follows from my advice.
Private individuals are outside our scope
I do not take on individuals asking about their own holdings, and I think that is a feature. A desk that answers everything answers nothing well. If you are a person with a personal question, a licensed adviser in your country is the right call, and I am happy to say so on the phone.