Solana-based Clockwork to shutter, citing ‘limited commercial upside’

The developers behind Solana-based smart contract automation project Clockwork is set to turn off key infrastructure for the protocol at the end of October, citing “limited commercial upside.”

In a series of X (Twitter) posts on Aug. 27, Clockwork founder Nick Garfield Garfield said he and the team will stop active development of the protocol and on Oct. 31 will turn off its nodes on devnet and mainnet.

Garfield cited “simple opportunity cost” as the reason for the team stepping back from Clockwork, admitting there were limited commercial benefits to continuing its development and the team had a growing interest in exploring other opportunities.

Clockwork is a protocol that allows users to schedule transactions on the Solana network and create smart contracts automated to run applications when triggered by an event.

Garfield said Clockwork’s code will remain open-source and freely available online and gave his “full endorsement to fork and ship” to anyone looking to continue work on the protocol.

Developers may continue to use the software as written, but we will shut down our nodes on devnet and mainnet as of Oct 31.

The on-chain programs will be frozen, and the code will remain open-source and free to fork on GitHub.

2/

— Nick (@time_composer) August 27, 2023

According to Crunchbase data, Clockwork raised $4 million last August in a seed round co-led by venture firms Multicoin Capital and Asymmetric along with participation from Solana Ventures.

Asked by one X user whether the seed money would be returned to investors, Garfield responded it still has a meaningful portion of the funds but he will take time “before deciding one way or the other.”

We still have a meaningful portion of our seed funding. Fully shutting down is an option, but I need to take a minute to reset myself before deciding one way or the other.

— Nick (@time_composer) August 27, 2023

Clockwork’s closure follows the shuttering of other Solana protocols, such as the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Friktion in January and its peer Everlend Finance a month later.

In late June the Solana-based nonfungible token protocol Cardinal also said it was winding down due to economic conditions after raising $4.4 million around a year earlier.

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