While it's great that they found a way to keep working on the project, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth personally because it feels like ultimate capitalism in play even when it comes to protocols like this. Status.im hasn't done much other than raised a huge round of ICO, so they're sitting on all this money they can use to buy out other "competitor" protocols. Sure, they have a prototype beta and I guess beta test…
There is no acquisition here, nor any expectation to use Status token. The only idea is for both projects to help each other, and if Status can help financially Matrix might help otherwise (e.g. provide a bridge to Whisper, Ethereum’s own real-time communication protocol and as such exposing all of the Matrix ecosystem into Ethereum and vice versa; continue working on Olm/Megolm such that it could be used for E2E encryption in Status etc).
As Jarrad says in their blog, we are all trying to provide a decentralised Web and no one knows today how it will look like in the future. By supporting other opensource projects Status is only trying to move the needle and promote open solutions rather than proprietary ones.
We at Matrix are very glad that some projects use their ICO money for the greater good, and in this case it will allow us to spend all our time and focus on polishing Riot, getting Matrix out of beta, finalising end-to-end crypto, rather than open yet another battle front by doing an ICO, or getting distracted by raising more funds or doing too much consulting work. Matrix might get to an ICO some day, and/or New Vector might get enough revenues to be sustainable and able to support both Riot and core devs for Matrix. But these are later steps.
Our side of the story is here fwiw: https://matrix.org/blog/2018/01/29/status-partners-up-with-n...