Vector v0.4.0: Concord Rising

A New Chapter

After an incredibly busy 3 months of development, with over 300 commits, we are happy to finally release v0.4.0 Vector (Open Beta) to the public! The biggest and most noticeable improvements for this release are largely focused on privacy, security, and user experience. Upon updating to the latest version, you will immediately notice differences in just about every corner of the app. There are many optimizations across the app and it should feel much more responsive, quick, and smooth.

Same Vision, New Protocol

One important aspect to mention is that Vector has pivoted from Marmot MDK to Concord Protocol, which is more aligned with the vision and long-term goals for Vector to provide both privacy and a smooth user experience in one package. What this means for users is that all of your previous group chats have been nuked, including the Vector Community group chat, but you can join the new one here. We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused, but it is indeed the cost of developing bleeding-edge technology. Most importantly, it was imperative to pivot earlier in development than later to ensure that Vector has the most optimal systems and tech laid at the foundation, allowing it to scale to help privacy become normalized for the average person in a way that is familiar to them. Privacy needs to meet people where they are, as too often people will opt out simply for convenience and fewer steps. Vector is here to change that.

We highly encourage everyone, both past users and new users, to join the new official Vector Community. This is now a public group that has a custom invite link, making it much easier to join and share. For future reference, all creators and admins can create custom invite links for any public groups they want. This can be used as a growth tool to help understand onboarding metrics for growing your own community.

Communities, Powered by Concord

This is the heart of v0.4.0.

For most of its life, Vector was about talking to people one-to-one. Now you can build a whole Community: a server with channels, roles, admins, and invites, the kind of space you'd expect from Discord. Except this one has a property Discord can't ever offer. Every message, every channel name, every member, all of it is end-to-end encrypted. The relays carrying your traffic can't read a single word.

Making that work meant building something genuinely new. We call it Concord, and it's a from-scratch messaging protocol for group spaces, running over the open Nostr network. Concord is to Communities what the Signal Protocol is to Signal: the invisible machinery underneath that makes the magic both possible and trustworthy. There's no datacenter. No company-run admin panel. No off switch anyone but you can reach.

And it doesn't feel like cryptography. Spin up a Community in seconds. Promote an admin and watch a verifiable crown appear next to their name, real authority, proven by keys, not a database flag. Drop voice notes in a channel. Tag someone, or rally everyone with @everyone. Kick a troublemaker, or escalate to a ban that re-keys the whole room and locks the door behind them. It looks and feels like the group apps you already know, and underneath, it's doing something none of them do.

New Features

Tor Integration

Highly requested and as promised...

Flip a single toggle in Settings, and every byte Vector sends, your messages, your media, your avatar, even the little profile lookups, gets routed through the Tor network. We embedded arti-client, the Tor Project's own official Rust implementation, directly into the app. No separate Tor Browser. No proxy to configure. Nothing to install. Just on, or off.

And the win is bigger than hiding your IP. With Tor on, your internet provider and any unwanted eyes can't even tell you're running Vector at all. For someone in a place where the app on your phone is itself the risk, that invisibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole point.

It fails safe, too. If Tor can't connect, Vector doesn't quietly drop back to a normal connection that would give you away, it stops, rather than expose you. Where Tor is blocked outright, built-in obfs4 bridges disguise the traffic so it slips through anyway, the same trick Tor Browser uses in the most locked-down corners of the world.

Multi-Device Support

Encrypted group chat across multiple devices is a famously hard problem, the kind of thing that quietly breaks in most apps and leaves you with half a conversation on your phone and the other half on your laptop.

In v0.4.0, "it just works". Join a Community on your laptop and it shows up on your phone. Leave it on your phone and it disappears from your laptop. Accept an invite on one device and it stops nagging you on the others. Your whole Community world, what you've joined, what you've left, what's still waiting for an answer, stays in sync across every device you own, carried in an encrypted personal list that only you can read. No re-joining. No "why is this group on one device but not the other." It simply follows you.

Multi-Account Support

One person is rarely just one identity. There's the you your friends know, the you that organizes, the you that wants to be nobody at all. v0.4.0 lets you run all of them on a single install and flip between them from a clean in-app switcher, no logging out, no juggling.

Each account is fully walled off, its own keys, its own contacts, its own Communities. Work and personal never bleed into each other, and an anonymous identity stays genuinely separate from the one with your face on it. They're a single tap apart, yet an entire world apart.

Remote Signing

Your private key is the one thing you can never get back if it leaks. So for the people guarding the highest-stakes identities, journalists, activists, anyone who simply refuses to take the risk, v0.4.0 supports remote signing over NIP-46.

Pair Vector with a "bunker" and your key never touches the app at all. It lives somewhere you control, and Vector asks it to sign things without ever seeing the secret itself. It's the same principle as a hardware wallet for your crypto: the key stays in the vault, the app just knocks on the door. If Vector were ever compromised, there'd be nothing in it to steal.

Public Community URL

Share a community with a single link.

A Community nobody can find is a lonely place. So we made joining one as easy as sharing a link, without giving up an ounce of the encryption underneath.

Mint a public invite link for your Community and drop it anywhere, your bio, a tweet, a group chat. Anyone who taps it lands on a clean join page and is one click from being inside. Paste a Vector invite link into a chat and it blooms into a rich card, the Community's name, its logo, a Join button, exactly like the platforms you're used to. And when you want to lock things down again, revoking the last link doesn't just hide it; it re-keys the whole Community, genuinely sealing it shut. Open when you want to grow, private the instant you don't.

Custom Emoji Packs

Emojis, bringing the heart and soul to communities where when words can't express how you feel, GIFs can. Every good community has its own language, and half of it is emoji. v0.4.0 brings full custom emoji packs to Vector, end to end.

Build your own pack, upload your images, crop them right in the app, and share the whole set with one link. Subscribe to other people's packs, pin a favorite to each of your themes, and sprinkle them through any chat or Community. The picker got a serious glow-up too, it opens instantly, searches smarter, and caches everything locally so your emoji are always a tap away. Your inside jokes, finally first-class.

Custom Wallpapers

Small feature, big change. v0.4.0 lets you set a custom wallpaper on any conversation, blur it, dim it, dial it in until it's just right. A photo of someone you love behind your chat with them, a calm gradient behind a busy group. It's your space now, so it should look like it.

Join the Vector Community

The best way to understand communities is to stand in one and connect with other like-minded individuals. The magic happens where open discussions are held.

Update to v0.4.0, open the official Vector Community, and you'll land in a room full of the people who build and use Vector and other great privacy tools, FOSS, and freedom tech every day. Ask questions, report bugs, request features, or just watch how a fully encrypted community feels in practice. This is where the next release gets shaped, and there's a seat for you in it.

What's Next

What to expect for the following release:

Now with more stable group chats, developers will be focused on improving the overall group chat and community experience. There is a lot of room for optimization and UX/UI polish, as well as adding more features to make connecting and sharing much more frictionless. As always, it is highly recommended to hop in and share your feedback with the community and developers. You can always speak your mind and share any feature requests you want or feel Vector is missing. There is a good chance it is already planned, but it helps developers prioritize implementations if a feature is constantly requested.

Moving forward, a massive frontend refactor will be taking place for the next release. This is largely for an improved development environment, but will also be noticeable on the frontend for users. After 16 months of non-stop development, it is time to clean up, organize, and optimize the codebase, especially in preparation for what is to come. Developers will also be running audits to see if and where there is dead or unused code to prune the codebase of any past baggage. One of the next largest releases for Vector will be the widescreen desktop client planned for v0.5.0. This version will be catered to desktop clients, where you can truly run Vector in full screen and utilize more visual real estate to enjoy the entire Vector ecosystem right at your fingertips.

Special Thanks

We wanted to give a special thanks not only to the community at large, which has grown tremendously over the past 6 months, but we also wanted to express our deepest gratitude to the last round of Quality Control Testers for this v0.4.0 release. You all have helped us realize the necessity for an imperative pivot to a more stable, suitable, and scalable protocol, as well as identify a lot of small bugs and inconsistencies. With that being said, we have been planning to release additional Vector Badges and have been designing new badges that will be released with future updates, which can be claimed by completing certain tasks like in the past. One of those badges is the Bug Hunter badge, which will come with high-level perks and benefits for future releases. Without disclosing too much, we will say that the team has documented who has officially discovered and reported bugs, and we look forward to rewarding you all with your well-deserved badges in the near future.