Author: Jesse Coghlan, Cointelegraph; Translated by: Song Xue, Golden Finance

Developers behind the Solana-based smart contract automation project Clockwork plan to shut down key infrastructure for the protocol at the end of October, citing “limited commercial upside.”

In a series of X (Twitter) posts on August 27, Clockwork founder Nick Garfield said that he and the team would stop actively developing the protocol and shut down its nodes on both the devnet and mainnet on October 31.

Garfield cited "simple opportunity cost" as the reason for the team's exit from Clockwork, acknowledging that there were limited commercial benefits to continued 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, with “full support for forks and releases” available to anyone who wants to continue working on the protocol.

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

When one X user asked if the seed round funds would be returned to investors, Garfield responded that it still holds a sizable portion of the funds, but that he needs time to “decide one way or the other.”

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

In late June, Solana-based non-fungible token protocol Cardinal also said it was ceasing development due to economic conditions after raising $4.4 million a year ago.