Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of Axion, the messaging service operated at axionchat.chat, including the Matrix homeserver matrix.axionchat.chat, the Jitsi conferencing instance at meet.axionchat.chat, and the official Axion mobile and desktop clients (collectively, the “Service”). The Service is operated by Adil Mustafayev, an independent operator currently established in Azerbaijan (the “Operator”, “we”, “us”).

1. Acceptance of these Terms

By creating an account on Axion, signing in with an existing account, or otherwise using the Service, you confirm that you have read these Terms and our Privacy Policy and agree to be bound by them. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service. If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you have authority to do so, and a separate Data Processing Agreement applies in addition.

You must be at least 16 years old, or the digital-consent age applicable in your country if higher, to register an account.

2. Description of the Service

Axion is a privacy-first messaging service built on the open Matrix protocol. It provides:

• One-to-one and group chat with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) enabled by default for direct messages and private rooms.
• Optional federation with other Matrix homeservers, on a per-room basis.
• Voice and video calling via a self-hosted Jitsi Meet instance.
• Push notifications via Sygnal forwarding to FCM (Android) and APNs (iOS/macOS).
• Encrypted backups of message keys via Matrix Secure Secret Storage, controlled by you.

The Service is provided on a best-effort basis. There is no contractual uptime guarantee, and we may modify or discontinue features with reasonable notice.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to use the Service to:

• send unsolicited bulk messages, advertising, scams, phishing, or chain-message spam;
• distribute, store, or link to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorist content, malware, or other content that is illegal under EU law, German law, or the law of your country of residence;
• harass, threaten, dox, or incite violence against other users or third parties;
• impersonate other people, brands, or organisations in a way that could mislead a reasonable observer;
• infringe intellectual-property or privacy rights of others;
• attempt to break, overload, or probe the Service for vulnerabilities outside the scope of our security policy — legitimate security research is welcome at security@aevrix.org;
• use the Service to relay traffic for botnets, command-and-control channels, or other malicious automation;
• circumvent moderation, ban evasion, or rate limits.

Abuse is enforced by the Mjolnir moderation bot together with a human operator. Sanctions range from warnings to room bans, account suspension, and account deletion. We will notify you of significant moderation action by in-app message and (if provided) by recovery email, and you may appeal in writing within 30 days.

Because end-to-end encryption is on by default, we cannot read message content. Abuse reports must therefore include the offending message ID, room ID, and a description of the behaviour, and ideally a copy of the offending content. Send reports to security@aevrix.org or via the in-app report flow.

4. Account responsibility

You are responsible for keeping your password and your device’s end-to-end encryption keys safe. We cannot recover end-to-end encrypted message history if you lose both your password and your Secure Secret Storage recovery key — the design of Matrix E2EE prevents us from doing so. We strongly recommend storing your recovery key in a password manager or printed in a safe place.

You must use the Service from your own account. You may not share credentials, and you must promptly report suspected unauthorised access to security@aevrix.org.

5. Intellectual property

5.1 Your content

You retain all intellectual-property rights in the messages, files, and media you send through the Service. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of your content to us.

To operate the Service, you grant us a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, transmit, route, federate, and serve your content to the recipients you address it to, and to retain reasonable backups, strictly for the purpose of running the Service. This licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backups, which expire on the schedule described in section 4 of the Privacy Policy.

For end-to-end encrypted content the licence is, in practice, a licence over an opaque ciphertext blob: we cannot read the content.

5.2 Our platform

The Axion brand, name, logo, the design of axionchat.chat, and the original Operator-authored client code are owned by the Operator. Upstream open-source components — Synapse, Element-derived clients, Jitsi Meet, Sygnal, Mjolnir, and others — remain the property of their respective copyright holders and are used under their original licences. The Operator’s own modifications to those components are released under the upstream licence (typically AGPL-3.0 or Apache-2.0) and published in the project’s public source repository.

6. Termination

You may terminate your account at any time by deactivating it from your client settings or by emailing trust@aevrix.org. After deactivation we follow the erasure procedure in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if your account is being used to harm other users or the Service, or if we are legally required to do so. Where reasonable and lawful, we will give you notice and an opportunity to cure the breach. We may suspend access immediately, without prior notice, in cases that pose an imminent risk — such as ongoing CSAM distribution, account compromise, or a network attack — and will provide an explanation as soon as it is safe to do so.

7. Disclaimer

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, whether express, implied or statutory, including but not limited to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy of data, and uninterrupted availability. We do not warrant that the Service will be free of bugs, that messages will always be delivered, that federation will always succeed, or that data will never be lost.

Statutory consumer-protection rights that cannot be excluded under the law of your country of residence are not affected by this section.

8. Limitation of liability

Axion is provided free of charge as an independent privacy project. To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost business, lost data, or loss of goodwill, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.
• Our total aggregate liability for any direct damages arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service is limited to one hundred euro (€100), or the amount you have paid us in the last twelve months for the Service, whichever is greater.
• Nothing in these Terms limits liability for: (a) death or personal injury caused by the Operator’s negligence; (b) intentional misconduct or gross negligence; (c) any liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including under GDPR.

9. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold the Operator harmless from any third-party claim arising out of your unlawful use of the Service, your violation of these Terms, or your infringement of third-party rights, except to the extent the claim is caused by the Operator’s own breach. This section does not apply to claims by a consumer against the Operator.

10. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms from time to time. Material changes take effect 30 days after we publish the updated version on this page and notify you in-app. Continued use of the Service after the effective date is acceptance of the new Terms; if you do not accept them, terminate your account before the effective date.

11. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Azerbaijan, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. When the Service is migrated to an Estonian e-Residency entity, the governing law will change to the laws of the Republic of Estonia, and we will publish a 30-day notice of that change.

If you are a consumer habitually resident in the EU/EEA, you also benefit from the mandatory consumer-protection rules of your country of residence. Nothing in this section deprives you of that protection.

Subject to mandatory consumer rules, the courts of Baku, Azerbaijan (and, after migration, the courts of Tallinn, Estonia) have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of these Terms.

12. Disputes and the EU ODR platform

We aim to resolve disputes informally. Please write to trust@aevrix.org with a description of the issue. We will respond within 14 days.

If you are an EU consumer and we cannot resolve a dispute, you may use the European Commission’s Online Dispute Resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are not currently obliged to participate in any specific consumer-arbitration body.

13. Miscellaneous

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid, the remaining provisions remain in force.

No waiver. Failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of that right.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor entity (in particular, the planned Estonian e-Residency company) provided that the successor accepts these Terms in full.

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Cookie Policy, and any DPA you have signed with us together constitute the entire agreement between you and the Operator regarding the Service.

14. Contact

General and legal: trust@aevrix.org
Abuse and security: security@aevrix.org