The developers behind Clockwork, a Solana-based smart contract automation project, planned to shut down the protocol’s key infrastructure 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 would cease active development of the protocol and shut down its devnet and mainnet nodes on Oct. 31.
Garfield cited “simple opportunity cost” as the reason for the team’s exit from Clockwork, acknowledging that there were limited commercial benefits to continuing development and that the team was increasingly interested in exploring other opportunities.
Clockwork is a protocol that allows users to schedule transactions on the Solana network and create smart contracts that automatically run applications when events are triggered.
Garfield said Clockwork’s code will remain open source and freely available online, and expressed “full support for forking and releasing” to anyone who wishes to continue working on the protocol.
Developers can continue to use the software, but we will be shutting down nodes on devnet and mainnet starting October 31st.
The program on the chain will be frozen, and the code will remain open source and freely forked on GitHub.
2/
— Nick (@time_composer) August 27, 2023
As reported by Crunchbase dataLast August, Clockwork raised $4 million in a seed round co-led by venture capital firms Multicoin Capital and Asymmetry, with participation from Solana Ventures.
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When an X user asked if the seed money would be returned to investors, Garfield replied that a good chunk of that money was still there, but he needed time “before deciding one way or the other.”
We still have a large portion of our seed funding. Turning off completely is an option, but I need to take a minute to reset myself before deciding which way to go.
— Nick (@time_composer) August 27, 2023
The shutdown of Clockwork follows the shutdown of other Solana protocols, such as decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Friktion in January and its counterpart Everlend Finance a month later.
In late June, Solana-based non-fungible token (NFT) protocol Cardinal also said it would be winding down due to economic conditions after raising $4.4 million a year ago.
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