In this case for example Matrix has been choosen as the Protocol to be used to connect all manner of Healthcareproviders, Healthinsurances and State Entitys in the Health sector in the future.
This is a highly fractured environment where there is alot of distrust and animosity between all the parties.
I see this e.g. as an incredible chance to provide matrix related services even for small companies in germany.
E.g. there are more than thousand software solutions that are registered with the health insurance companies to manage patient data and billing processes.
In addition, Matrix has been chosen for quite a few large deployments by governments, so there presumably are large-ish support contracts associated with those.
If that's enough to justify a 30 Million round is another question.
> there are no plans to use cryptocurrency incentives in Matrix or Element any time soon
Note the wording here... "any time soon" is quite different from "no plans, period".
Matrix has a fantastic B2B potential. It's just early.
The name of the protocol is very badly chosen though.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...
I would have thought it would work just like outsourcing your web server or your email service. You generate a DNS name and point it at their IP address. Then they get a certificate and start serving traffic for your domain. Easy peasy.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...
The enterprise potential for the Matrix ecosystem which includes Element is almost like what GitLab has done but for Git services and much more.
> The majority of the core team is now employed by Element, an independent company set up to hire the team and support Matrix's development. Other contributors are funded by their own employers or donate their own time to the project.
At least they are not fully reliant on donations and they have a solid way of making money.
We're fixing this by working on P2P Matrix (as per the blog post - it's one of the main initiatives that the funding is going towards). https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix explains how P2P addresses the metadata problem.
The whole "heavily sponsored by the intelligence community" thing is a conspiracy theory. It's true that Matrix is popular with government and national security folks and Element gets money from them... but it's because they want the E2EE and data sovereignty for themselves, rather than because they are trying to torment their citizens(!!)
I love Matrix, it is actually my primary chat network. But the way these features are getting added makes me really disappointed. You don't make a secure protocol by stuffing as many features as you can then adding encryption later. You build a secure protocol by making sure that every feature added is secure from the start, otherwise it is rejected or needs to explicitly justify why it can't or shouldn't be made secure.
It seems like the connection to Amdocs and their interest in collecting metadata for surveillance is a stain on the privacy-focused image.
Now it is too late to rethink the design to be less of a honeypot. So the only solution is P2P matrix. But even P2P matrix will need some way to back up the metadata so it’s saved between sessions. So again the honeypot seems unavoidable.
The tone of the part about connections to Israeli intelligence doesn’t read as “anti-Semitic” to me, as it’s pointed at motivations of the government spy apparatus and doesn’t make generalizations about Israeli or Jewish people. Though the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm is hard to untangle.
The overall tone is sadly that of someone who has spent too much time making internet memes, but I believe the author is a trained linguist with a sardonic sense of humor.
> finish building out P2P Matrix and get it live
ps: p2p is nice to have, but also comes with a lot of problems and and probably shouldn't be a first choice for many users.