Clockwork, built on the Solana platform, to close operations due to ‘restricted commercial potential’

The team behind the Solana-based smart contract automation initiative Clockwork is planning to deactivate essential infrastructure for the protocol by the end of October, citing “limited commercial upside.”

In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) dated Aug. 27, Clockwork founder Nick Garfield announced that he and his team would cease active development of the protocol and will disable its nodes on both devnet and mainnet on Oct. 31.

Garfield mentioned “simple opportunity cost” as the rationale for the team’s withdrawal from Clockwork, acknowledging that there were minimal commercial advantages to persisting with its development and that the team had a growing interest in pursuing other ventures.

Clockwork is a protocol that enables users to schedule transactions on the Solana network and to create smart contracts that are automated to execute applications when triggered by specific events.

Garfield stated that Clockwork’s code will remain open-source and accessible online, and he expressed his “full endorsement to fork and ship” to anyone interested in continuing the development of the protocol.

Developers may continue to utilize the software as it is, but we will deactivate our nodes on devnet and mainnet as of Oct 31.
The on-chain programs will be frozen, and the code will stay open-source and available for forking on GitHub.
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— Nick (@time_composer) August 27, 2023

As per Crunchbase data, last August Clockwork secured $4 million in a seed funding round co-led by venture firms Multicoin Capital and Asymmetric, with additional participation from Solana Ventures.

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When asked by an X user if the seed funding would be returned to investors, Garfield replied that a significant portion of the funds remains, 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

The closure of Clockwork follows the shutdown of other Solana protocols, including the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Friktion in January and its counterpart Everlend Finance a month later.

In late June, the Solana-based non-fungible token (NFT) protocol Cardinal also announced it was winding down due to economic conditions after raising $4.4 million approximately a year prior.

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