Base Hits Pause: Coinbase's L2 Takes a 2-Hour Coffee Break Before Its Beryl Upgrade ☕

Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, halted block production for more than two hours on Thursday after an invalid block disrupted its sequencer, just hours before a scheduled network upgrade. The issue first surfaced around noon ET, with the Base team posting on X at 12:20 p.m. ET that "Base Mainnet is currently halted while the team works on an issue with block production. All funds are secure, and we'll update below once resolved."

Around 1:00 p.m. ET, the team said it had identified the issue. "We continue to debug and have isolated a consensus problem that caused an invalid block to be sequenced," Base posted on its status page. "This prevented new blocks from being created." Within roughly an hour, sequencing resumed and blocks were again being produced, though the network said it was still working to determine the root cause.

Base confirmed on X that "blocks are being produced and we're seeing apps and infrastructure coming back online as their Base nodes are restarted and synced," adding that "recovery should be quick for each app/infrastructure provider once the node restarts are initiated." Thursday's outage marked the first block production and deposit issue on Base mainnet in the last 90 days, according to its status page, though the network reported around 30 hours of withdrawal delays in May. A representative for Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The disruption came as Base continues rolling out its Beryl hardfork, an upgrade designed to implement a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on the network while reducing withdrawal delays. The network's status page indicated the upgrade was still in progress following the recovery.

Outages of this kind remain rare across major chains but have periodically interrupted activity elsewhere in the industry. Earlier this year, layer-1 network Sui suffered outages on three consecutive days following gas and validator bugs on its mainnet, while Solana, another prominent layer-1, has not reported a mainnet issue since February 2024.