DROO AMOR

About

Hey, I'm Drew. I spent my twenties in engine rooms, first as a merchant mariner, then aboard nuclear submarines. I maintained secondary systems on Virginia-class boats (everything from the toilet up to and not including the reactor), eventually moved into test engineering, and ended up doing R&D inventions for submarines unexpectedly. A few of my inventions have been included in the Virginia and Columbia class block. I love complex, distributed, and asymmetric systems.

I got into crypto as a protocol specialist at Blockdaemon, then as a contributor at Lido DAO. Two of the biggest staking operations. I figured out what I wanted to build and left to do it with people I trusted.

Now I run xochi.fi and axol.io. Xochi (pronounced: 'So-Chee') is a private exchange on Ethereum, it's meant to be a more friendly dark pool experience you can use to trade without exposing your orders. ZK proofs handle compliance instead of handing over your data. I believe economic and digital privacy must be embedded as first class citizens in a product. Where others find dichotomy, axolotls combinate and collaborate. We co-authored ERC-8262 (Zero-Knowledge Compliance Oracle) to standardize this approach as a public spec. axol.io runs the infra underneath: staking, an ETH client, sequencers, Builder.

I'm also building a Gundam. Not a metaphor. Raxol is the terminal framework behind it. It started as a TUI project, but now it's the agent commerce layer for Xochi: wallets that can act on their own.

When something I depend on can be made faster, I send it upstream. Most of that has gone to FFmpeg: twelve commits merged into master, hand-written aarch64 NEON assembly for libswscale's YUV to RGB conversion. The 16-bit output formats had no NEON path, so anything asking for rgb565 or rgb555 on ARM fell back to C. Filling that in runs 3.3x to 4.7x faster on an M1, and the row-pair series was co-authored with Ramiro Polla. The first libavfilter aarch64 patch from that work is in review. Martin Storsjö benchmarked it across seven ARM cores and measured 60 to 70 percent on the A520 and A720, 10 to 20 percent on the rest.

Smaller fixes go the same way: a Charon health check fix in Dappnode's Obol DVT package, and two extensions (aztec-noir, synthwave84) in the Zed marketplace.

The open infrastructure underneath Xochi (Mana, the ZK compliance standard, the stealth address primitives, the whitehat research) is funded through Giveth.