Matrix (protocol)

Beginning–2018 The initial project was created inside Amdocs, while building a chat tool called "Amdocs Unified Communications", and of the "Best in Show" award at WebRTC World in 2015.) to generate income. and the program was open-sourced and released on iOS and Android in April 2019. In October 2018, a Community Interest Company called "The Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C." Later that year, in October 2019, the company New Vector raised an additional US$8.5 million for the development of Matrix. By the end of the year, several organizations announced plans for adoption. In December 2019, the German Federal Ministry of Defense began a pilot project named BwMessenger, based on the Matrix protocol, a Synapse server, and the Riot application modeled after France's Tchap project. Also in December, Mozilla announced it would replace its IRC infrastructure with Matrix, scheduling the migration for early 2020. Following its announcement, Mozilla completed its transition by shutting down its IRC server in March 2020 and directing users to its new Matrix instance. In May 2020, end-to-end encryption was enabled by default for all new private conversations within the protocol. In October of that year, the company Element acquired the Gitter chat platform from GitLab, announcing plans to migrate all Gitter users to Matrix. By March 2021, the Matrix.org Foundation reported that there were 28 million global visible accounts on the network. In September 2022, security vulnerabilities were disclosed in the implementation of a client-side encryption library. Due to the protocol's interoperable design, the issue was limited to the affected client applications, which required an upgrade, while the protocol itself and third-party implementations were not affected. According to the disclosure, all critical issues were fixed, with the remaining ones being either non-exploitable in practice or already covered by warnings in the client interface. 2022–present In February 2023, the Matrix Foundation was invited to the Digital Markets Act stakeholder workshop on "Interoperability between messaging services" and showcased how a standardised open protocol can be used to interoperate without sacrificing privacy. In June 2023, Beeper became the first member of The Matrix Foundation. In April 2024, the first elections of the Matrix Foundation's Governing Board were held, which is made up of nine different constituency groups across three categories: nonprofit and community representatives, funder representatives, and foundation representatives. In late 2024, version 2.0 of the Matrix protocol was released, which improved performance and added video/VoIP chat for multiple users. In February 2026, Matrix saw a rise in users due to Discord's controversial announcement of age verification for users, resulting in a push for users to migrate to Matrix as a replacement. == Protocol ==

Matrix targets use cases like voice over IP, Internet of things and instant messaging, including group communication, along with a longer-term goal to be a generic messaging and data synchronization system for the web. The protocol supports security and replication, maintaining full conversation history, with no single points of control or failure. Existing communication services can integrate with the Matrix ecosystem. and have been addressed by the Matrix team. The review was partially funded by Germany's national agency for the healthcare system digitalisation (). • libolm, the former reference implementation, has been subject of a cryptographic review by NCC Group, whose findings are publicly available, == Bridges ==

Matrix supports bridging messages from different chat applications into Matrix rooms. These bridges are programs that run on the server and communicate with the non-Matrix servers. Bridges can either be acting as puppets or relays, where in the former the individual user's account is visibly posting the messages, and in the latter a bot posts the messages for non-puppeteered user accounts. Currently there are official bridges for: • Gitter • IRC • Slack/Mattermost • XMPP Bridges for the following notable applications are maintained by the community: • Apple iMessage • Discord • Email • Facebook Messenger/Instagram • Google Chat • GroupMe • Mastodon • RSS/Twitter feeds • Signal • Skype • Telegram • SMS • WeChat • WhatsApp • LinkedIn Chat of some games such as Luanti can also be bridged to a Matrix room using a mod. == Adoption ==

Communication among the public agents of France's central administration happens on a Matrix-based internal network, named . The project is developed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs () with the explicit goals of security and digital sovereignty, both of which were deemed to be impossible through WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack. Germany's national healthcare system's internal communication network uses a Matrix-based system (Ti-Messenger) for real-time communication among Germany's healthcare organizations and sharing of sensitive patient data, and is developed by the national agency for the digitalisation of the healthcare system ( GmbH). Reasons for choosing Matrix included federated identity management, which allows to reuse the existing identity infrastructure into the new chat system; the decentralized architecture, which allows cross-linking data from disparate sources; and the open protocol, which ensures interoperability and future-proof data exchange and prevents vendor lock-in. Employees of the Bundeswehr (Germany's armed forces) communicate with each other, and share classified documents (German VS-NfD), on a private Matrix network, with a customized version of the Matrix Element app: BwMessenger (as mentioned above). Two states of Germany run their own Matrix chat networks for schools. Rhineland-Palatinate is offering SchulchatRLP as a fork of FluffyChat since the beginning of 2024. The server is sized for half a million pupils and deployed on Kubernetes and the client was enhanced with features such as read receipt for parents or polls by Fairkom, who became a silver partner of the Matrix foundation in 2023. Bavaria has adapted the Element client as a proprietary ByCS messenger. Luxembourg has developed a Matrix-based chat service for government officials, named Luxchat4Gov, planned to be released in the second quartal of 2023. The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan) is using Matrix for internal communications. Rocket.Chat recommends federation between RocketChat servers with its built-in Matrix bridge since version 4.7.0. FOSDEM uses Matrix since 2021. The hosting is provided by Element Matrix Services, which publishes the technical details for public review soon after the event. Polish Armed Forces introduced a Matrix protocol based communicator in 2023, to exchange unclassified information among Polish Army soldiers as well as for Ministry of National Defence employees. == See also ==