Clockwork, a decentralized automation network for Solana, announced the closure of a $4 million seed round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Asymmetric.
Solana Ventures and El Cap Ventures also
participated in the round, according to a release on Tuesday.
The network enables developers to schedule
recurring tasks and automate on-chain workflows with the Solana validator
network, said Nick Garfield, founder and CEO of Clockwork in the release.
Automating tasks can be more difficult to
execute in decentralized environments, he added. Clockwork solves this by
incentivizing validators to execute scheduled transactions, which means
developers will be able to implement automated tasks without sacrificing
decentralization.
The new funds will be used to expand the team,
build community and support partner integrations.
The startup is currently working with multisig
wallet and DAO tooling services to provide payroll solutions like scheduled
token transfers, said a spokesperson.
“Clockwork answers a whole bunch of questions
that have held back dapp development from moving up the stack—How should nodes
track and delegate scheduled tasks? What if a malicious node attempts to
execute a task ahead of schedule? Is the scheduler fault-tolerant if some nodes
go down? None of these questions had answers before Clockwork,” said Kyle
Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, in the release.
Incentivizing infrastructure
Validators that install Clockwork’s plugin
will be able to collect automation fees from crank tasks, which
is the act of automating an instruction on the blockchain. This
will increase their yields, per the release.
Founded in September 2021, Clockwork,
formerly known as Cronos, was initially setup to develop a payment programs on
Solana. It recently won the Solana
Riptide hackathon, which is a global hackathon with 7,000
participants.
“At Asymmetric, we’ve studied the massive
impact that ‘cron’ has had on systems-level programming and applications since
the late 1970s. Clockwork will usher in the latest iteration of ‘cron’ into
web3, and we're excited to see this effort,” said John McCann, founder and
managing partner, of Asymmetric in a statement.
The Block
Research's July funding report noted
that in previous market cycles of digital assets, during market turmoil,
infrastructure plays have often proven a favored investment choice.
Source: theblock.co