Matthew Hodgson has spent more than a decade working on a question most people never think to ask: what happens if your communications infrastructure disappears overnight. Hodgson, the CEO and CTO of Element, built one of the most widely used fully encrypted, open source communication protocols in the world. Today, versions of his software, Matrix, are used by more than thirty governments.
“Our context is giving people the ability to run their own encrypted communication systems entirely on their own terms, with full digital sovereignty,” Hodgson said. “Are you able to communicate if you are the only country in the world. If the answer is no, then you do not have resilience, and you do not have digital sovereignty.”
His answer is Matrix, an open system that lets governments, organizations, and even individuals run their own encrypted networks without relying on outside providers. The point is not convenience. It is control. If a country cannot communicate on its own terms, it is dependent on systems it does not own and cannot fully secure.
Matrix sits underneath Element, the commercial product Hodgson built to help large organizations deploy and manage these systems at scale. The structure is deliberate. Matrix remains a nonprofit foundation that maintains the core protocol and key building blocks, including encryption. Element operates as the for-profit layer that turns those tools into production-ready systems.
“Matrix is a nonprofit foundation that publishes the core protocol and some of the key building blocks,” Hodgson said. “It is independent from Element, which we set up in 2017 to provide commercial deployments. There are now hundreds of vendors in the Matrix ecosystem. Palantir’s chat product is based on Matrix. So is Talos’s.”
What makes the story unusual is how it started. Hodgson and his team built the system before they had clear commercial demand. They funded the early development themselves, worked through the difficult parts of deployment, and proved it could operate in sensitive environments. Governments came later. France was one of the first major adopters, followed by NATO and a growing list of countries that needed systems they could control directly.
Hodgson is pleased with his position as an open-source dev with the instincts of a businessperson.
“I guess we have a slight unfair advantage that we are the only people providing interoperable, secure comms,” he said. “If you were a government wanting to run your own heterogeneous, encrypted communication network, to my knowledge, there is nobody else doing this.”
Hodgson reported that he was offering his services to Ukraine pro bono and that other countries are taking up his offer on powerful, secure communications that mimic nearly everything available from other comms platforms.
“The experience you get with Element feels a lot like Teams or WhatsApp or Zoom rather than ICQ or MSN,” he said. In fact, Belgium recently rolled out a Matrix implementation that will eventually move into enterprise mode.
“It’s entirely digitally sovereign communication that they’ve rolled out themselves out of Belgium. They get to check both boxes of having the warm, fuzzy feeling of branding it and owning it and controlling it and doing it in-house, whilst also benefiting from the wider ecosystem and being able to talk to the guys in Luxembourg,” he said.
