The time limit has expired for Clockwork, an automation tooling startup in Solana. Nick Garfield, the project’s creator and a partner at Multicoin Capital, announced on Sunday that he and his group were “stepping away from active development of the protocol” and that the infrastructure supporting the project would be shut off on October 31. Payroll transfers and other routine transactions that smart contracts, the foundation for creating economies on blockchains, can possibly improve are the focus of Clockwork’s technology. “Ultimately the reason we are stepping away now is simple opportunity cost,” Garfield said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “We admittedly see limited commercial upside in continuing to develop the protocol, and have a growing personal interest to explore new opportunities.” Even when the company stops supporting Clockwork, Garfield advised users to clone the project’s open source code and create their own variations.