Matrix (sometimes stylized as [matrix] or [m] for short) is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email currently does for store-and-forward email service, by allowing users with accounts at one communications service provider to communicate with users of a different service provider via online chat, voice over IP, and videotelephony. It therefore serves a similar purpose to protocols like XMPP, but is not based on any existing communication protocol. From a technical perspective, it is an application layer communication protocol for federated real-time communication. It provides HTTP APIs and open source reference implementations for securely distributing and persisting messages in JSON format over an open federation of servers. It can integrate with standard web services via WebRTC, facilitating browser-to-browser applications.
History
Beginning–2018 The initial project was created inside Amdocs, while building a chat tool called "Amdocs Unified Communications", by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape. Amdocs then funded most of the development work from 2014 to October 2017. Matrix was the winner of the Innovation award at WebRTC 2014 Conference & Expo, and of the "Best in Show" award at WebRTC World in 2015. The protocol received praise mixed with some cautionary notes after it launched in 2014. Reviewers noted that other attempts at defining an open instant messaging or multimedia signalling protocol of this type had difficulties becoming widely adopted—e.g. XMPP and IRCv3—and have highlighted the challenges involved, both technological and political. Some were unclear if there was enough demand among users for services which interoperate among providers. In 2015, a subsidiary of Amdocs was created, named "Vector Creations Limited", and the Matrix staff was moved there. In July 2017, the funding by Amdocs was announced to be cut and in the following weeks the core team created their own UK-based company, "New Vector Limited", which was mainly built to support the development of Matrix and Riot, the second of which was later renamed to Element. During this time period, there were multiple calls for support to the community and companies that build on Matrix, to help pay for the wages of at least part of the core team. Patreon and Liberapay crowdfunding accounts were created, and the core team started a video podcast, called Matrix "Live" to keep the contributors up to speed with ongoing developments. This was expanded by a weekly blog format, called "This Week in Matrix", where interested community members could read, or submit their own, Matrix-related news. The company was created with the goal of offering consultancy services for Matrix and paid hosting of Matrix servers (as a platform called modular.im, which was later renamed to Element matrix services) to generate income. In the early weeks after its creation, the Matrix team and the company Purism published plans to collaborate in the creation of the Librem 5 phone. The Librem 5 was intended to be a Matrix native phone, where the default pre-installed messaging and caller app should use Matrix for audio and video calls and instant messaging. In 2017, KDE announced it was working on including support for the protocol in its IRC client Konversation. In late January 2018, the company received an investment of US$5 million from Status, an Ethereum based startup. In April 2018, the French Government announced plans to create their own instant messaging tool. Work on the application based on Riot and Matrix protocol—called Tchap after French scientist Claude Chappe—had started in early 2018, 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." was incorporated, to serve as a neutral legal entity for further development of the standard.
2019–2021 In early 2019, the Matrix protocol saw increased adoption and underwent significant development. The KDE community announced in February 2019 its intention to use Matrix for internal communications, citing its decentralized nature as an alternative to services like Telegram, Slack and Discord, and planned to operate its own server instance. Two months later, in April 2019, the production servers of Matrix.org were compromised in a security breach of production servers and not the protocol. In June 2019, the Matrix protocol left beta phase with the release of version 1.0 across all its APIs. During this time, the Matrix Foundation was also officially launched to oversee the protocol, and Synapse was serving as its reference homeserver implementation. 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.
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