Matrix has traditionally been a decentralised rather than distributed protocol - with conversations replicated over all the servers whose users are participating in that conversation. However, Matrix clients connect to only one homeserver, which then becomes a central point of control over that account, even though the conversations themselves are decentralised. P2P Matrix changes everything by making the protocol completely distributed; compiling down the whole server stack to run within the client, and connecting the clients together over a P2P overlay network such as libp2p, Yggdrasil or our new Pinecone overlay. The approach is particularly nice because the client code doesn't need to change at all: it just connects to a local server rather than a remote one.

We'll demonstrate the work we've done on our Golang Matrix server implementation, Dendrite, in order to get it robust enough for P2P (which is a great stress test!), explain Pinecone, and give the latest updates on decentralised accounts, privacy preserving relay nodes, and how we'll turn Matrix into a hybrid P2P/client-server network in the future!