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It’s been quite some time since Matthew and I had caught up. It was great to catch up, understand the progress, and finally see how Matthew and Amandine’s vision will come to pass. That is Matrix becoming the communications protocol of the web. Element does the implementations, e.g. Element Server Suite, while Matrix is the open source project.

I see the combination of TNID and Matrix creating a powerful communications and identity solution. Matrix has avoided identity so far, while work on identity has progressed in leaps and bounds with SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity) thanks to the work of W3C (Decentralized Identifiers), FIDO Alliance, and many more. From a technology perspective things are finally coming together between Matrix and SSI, and from this point on could move fast.

Matthew and Amandine came to me one decade ago at a WebRTC Conference in London with the vision of Matrix, I was impressed, loved the idea, my only concern was how to make money. Well since then, that issues has been solved. Here is a YouTube short where Matthew provides a great summary of Matrix and my minor role.

This week Matrix announced new customers with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) and BigBlueButton providing not just the messaging and voice, but also the video.

The UN deal is massive, this cements Element/Matrix as the solution for governments around the world, given all their knowledge and value add in compliance, security, regionalization, diplomatic protections, audit, anti-virus, border gateways, etc. Matrix has 141 million users, with 100k deployments. They are building out a strong position in education as well.

Other messaging platforms like RocketChat and MatterMost have adopted Matrix. There is a growing ecosystem of companies deploying Matrix for enterprises and governments. We discussed their path into the financial industry and consumer, and that had Johnny immediately offering his services. I’m sure more coming on that soon.

We moved back to the origins for Matrix 10 years ago, with the frustrations Matthew and his team faced in competing against WhatsApp in Brasil. How the SIP and SMPP protocols were not built for the web. And that gap led to the creation of Matrix.

Matrix are actively involved in the EU DMA (Digital Markets Act) gatekeeper work, check out this post “The DMA Stakeholder Workshop: Interoperability between messaging services“. Matthew noted attendees are a few specialist like Matrix, the large web companies (Meta, Google, etc.) and telcos. They’ve build a WhatsApp-Matrix gateway, how this goes to market is yet to be decided. However, after the likes of WhatsApp are made interoperable, SMS would seem a likely next stop.