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Edilma Howard
Meanwhile, the Matrix ecosystem has continued to grow unbelievably - with huge numbers of independent clients, bots and bridges maturing into ecosystems of their own, whole new companies forming around the protocol, and organisations ranging from open source projects to governments, NGOs and Fortune 100 companies adopting Matrix as a way to run their own secure, decentralised, standards-based self-sovereign communication.
The mission of Matrix 2.0 has been to provide a huge step forwards in real-world performance, usability and stability - and that means using a real client codebase as a guinea pig to ensure the new protocol is fit for purpose. matrix-rust-sdk has been the main vehicle for this, with Element X as the app primarily driving the new features (although other clients built on matrix-rust-sdk such as Fractal 5 can then automatically benefit from the work should they wish).
To see what all the fuss is about, your best bet is probably to head over to the Element X launch blog post and read all about it! But from the Matrix perspective, this is a flag day in terms of the existence of a Matrix client which empirically outperforms the mainstream clients both in terms of usability and performance: it shows that Matrix is indeed viable to power communication for billions of users, should we get the chance.
From a client perspective: this has meant implementing Sliding Sync (MSC3575) in matrix-rust-sdk - and then creating the entirely new matrix-sdk-ui crate in order to expose higher level APIs to help apps efficiently drive their UI, without each app having to keep reinventing the wheel and risking getting it wrong. The new UI crate gives APIs for efficiently managing a lazy-loaded room list, lazy-loaded room timelines (including edits, reactions, aggregations, redactions etc), and even when the app should show a sync spinner or not. As a result, the vast majority of the heavy lifting can be handled in matrix-rust-sdk, ensuring that the app layer can focus on UI rather than Matrix guts - and performance improvements (e.g. roomlist caching and timeline caching) can all be handled in one place to the benefit of all clients using the SDK.
The single biggest change in Matrix 2.0 is the proposal of an entirely new sync API called Sliding Sync (MSC3575). The goal of Sliding Sync is to ensure that the application has the option of loading the absolutely bare essential data required to render its visible user interface - ensuring that operations which have historically been horribly slow in Matrix (login and initial sync, launch and incremental sync) are instant, no matter how many rooms the user is in or how large those rooms are.
Another pillar of Matrix 2.0 is that we finally have native Matrix Group VoIP calling (MSC3401)! Much like Sliding Sync has been developed using Element X as a testbed, Element Call has been the guinea pig for getting fully end-to-end-encrypted, scalable group voice/video calling implemented on top of Matrix, building on top of matrix-js-sdk. And as of today, Element Call finally has it working, complete with end-to-end encryption (and integrated in Element X, for that matter)!
Finally, today marks the release of Element Call Beta 4, which adds back end-to-end encryption via the LiveKit SFU (currently by using a shared static secret, but in the near future will support full Matrix-negotiated end-to-end encryption with sender keys) - and also includes a complete visual refresh. The next steps here include bringing back support for full mesh as well as SFU, for environments without an SFU, and updating all the MSCs to recognise the hybrid signalling model that reality has converged on when using LiveKit. Meanwhile, head over to to give it a go, or read more about it in the Element X Ignition blog post!
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