Clockwork, an automation tool project by Solana, has decided to shut down due to limited commercial returns. Nick Garfield, co-founder of Clockwork, announced on Twitter that the project will shut down its nodes on Devnet and mainnet on October 31. Garfield identified the opportunity cost as the primary reason for closing Clockwork.
Solana’s Clockwork Project is Shutting Down
The Solana team, who believed that the project, which had garnered attention with a $4 million investment in the past, could not progress, decided to pull the plug. The development team made the following statement about the matter:
We acknowledge that there is limited commercial return in continuing to develop the protocol, and we have a growing personal interest in exploring new opportunities.
According to its official website, Clockwork allowed users to schedule transactions and create automatic, event-driven smart contracts. While the team will stop further development, the code will remain open source on GitHub.
Garfield said:
The beauty of crypto is that it is truly open and permissionless. If you have a vision to improve the protocol, you have our full support to fork it and ship it.
According to Crunchbase, Clockwork raised $4 million from Multicoin Capital, Solana Ventures, and Asymmetric in August 2022. As it has been about a year since the investment round, community members were wondering whether the unused funds would be returned to the investors. A Twitter user named “tracy.sol” wrote:
It’s a tough question, but I’m just curious, if there are funds left from the seed round, will they be refunded to the investors and accounted as losses?
Garfield stated that he has not made a decision regarding the remaining seed round funds. He wrote:
A significant portion of our seed fund is still in our possession. Closing down completely is an option, but I need a minute to reset before making any decisions.
Bear Market Continues: More Projects Shutting Down
Due to the difficulties in the bear market, another Solana-based project, Friktion, announced that it will shut down in January 2023. Solana was heavily affected by the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research in November 2022. The total value locked in the Solana ecosystem dropped from around $1 billion in November to $310 million today.
Solana was not alone in suffering, as other blockchain networks also experienced significant losses. It was previously announced that Algorand had shut down operations of its top decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, AlgoF, in July 2023.
Another project, Everledger, suspended its operations in May 2023 due to funding shortages. Some analysts are calling the current market, which has lasted over 500 days, the longest Bitcoin bear market to date.
