Base Hits Pause, Beryl Plays On: Coinbase L2 Recovers From Two-Hour Block Halt 🟦

Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, returned online on Thursday after roughly two hours of halted block production triggered by a consensus bug that produced an invalid sequenced block. Base Build (@buildonbase) said in updates on X that blocks "are being produced normally, and we have verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem," while creator Jesse Pollak wrote that all funds on the network are safe, adding, "but a halt is not okay and we'll use this to continue to level up base as a platform for global, 24/7 finance."

According to Base's status page, the network first flagged unhealthy block production at 4:03 pm UTC on Thursday. At 5:21 pm UTC, the team said it had "isolated a consensus problem that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. This prevented new blocks from being created," and shortly before 6 pm UTC reported that it had "recovered healthy blockbuilding" and that ecosystem-wide infrastructure was able to sync. The team said it had identified the issue and would investigate the root cause, with a full post-mortem to follow.

The outage marked the first mainnet block production and deposit issue on Base in the last 90 days, according to its status page, though the network reported around 30 hours of withdrawal delays in May. Its last major outage occurred in August 2025, when Base went down for 33 minutes.

The downtime came just hours before the network's scheduled Beryl hardfork upgrade at 6 pm UTC, which was completed two hours later at 8 pm UTC. The upgrade introduces a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and is intended to reduce withdrawal delays.

Blockchain outages have periodically affected major networks, including layer-1 Sui, which suffered downtime on back-to-back days earlier this year following gas and validator bugs on its mainnet, and Solana, which has not reported a mainnet issue since February 2024. A representative for Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.