Solana’s Automation Project Clockwork Shuts Down

A Solana automation tooling project, Clockwork has decided call it a day due to limited commercial upside.

Nick Garfield, the co-founder of Clockwork, announced on X (Twitter) that the project will shut down nodes on Devnet and mainnet on Oct. 31. Garfield cited opportunity cost as a primary reason for shutting down Clockwork.

Solana’s Clockwork Shuts Down After Raising $4 Million From Investors

He wrote:

“We admittedly see limited commercial upside in continuing to develop the protocol and have a growing personal interest to explore new opportunities.”

According to the official website, Clockwork allows its users to schedule transactions and build automated, event-driven smart contracts. While the team will stop further development, they will let the code remain open-sourced on GitHub.

Garfield said:

“The beauty of crypto is that it is truly open and permissionless. If you have a vision for improving the protocol, you have our full endorsement to fork and ship it.”

According to Crunchbase, Clockwork raised $4 million from Multicoin Capital, Solana Ventures, and Asymmetric in August 2022.

As it has been nearly one year since the investment round, community members were curious if the unused funds would be returned to investors. An X (Twitter) user, “tracy.sol” wrote:

Tough Q but just curious, if there’s any money remaining from the seed round, will that be returned to investors and be written off as a loss?

Garfield replied that he had not decided on the remaining seed round funds. He wrote:

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.

Projects Give Up Amid Longest Bear Market

Due to the bear market woes, another Solana-based project, Friktion, announced it was shutting down in January 2023. Solana was impacted greatly by the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research in November 2022.

The total value locked in the Solana ecosystem is down from around $1 billion in November to $310 million today.

Solana is not alone, as other blockchain networks have also suffered greatly. BeInCrypto reported in July 2023 that Algorand’s top decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, AlgoF, announced the closure of its operations.

Another project, Everledger, wound up operations in May 2023 due to a lack of funding. At more than 500 days, some analysts are calling the current market the longest Bitcoin bear market ever.

Got something to say about Solana, the Clockwork project, or anything else? Write to us or join the discussion on our Telegram channel. You can also catch us on TikTok, Facebook, or X (Twitter).

For BeInCrypto’s latest Bitcoin (BTC) analysis, click here.