Base hits pause for two hours, then promises to never hit pause again 🛑

Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, halted block production for roughly two hours on Thursday after a consensus bug sequenced an invalid block and stopped the chain from advancing. The network first flagged "unhealthy" block production at 4:03 p.m. UTC on June 25 and confirmed on its status page at 5:21 p.m. UTC that it had "isolated a consensus problem that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. This prevented new blocks from being created." By just before 6 p.m. UTC, Base reported it had "recovered healthy blockbuilding" and that ecosystem infrastructure was resyncing as node operators restarted their clients. The team said it would publish a full post-mortem after investigating the root cause.

Base posted to X at 12:20 p.m. ET that "Base Mainnet is currently halted while the team works on an issue with block production," adding, "All funds are secure, and we'll update below once resolved." After recovery, the network said blocks "are being produced normally, and we have verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem." Base creator Jesse Pollak wrote on X that funds remained safe and acknowledged the disruption: "All funds are/were safe. 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."

The episode is the first block production and deposit issue on Base's mainnet in the last 90 days, according to its status page. The network's previous major outage came in August 2025, when it went down for 33 minutes. In May, Base reported around 30 hours of withdrawal delays. One source tracking the incident reported that as of June 26 at 10:36 a.m. UTC, deposits still faced a "major outage" while withdrawals were only partially degraded, and that mainnet block production remained "unhealthy."

The downtime occurred hours before Base's scheduled Beryl hard fork, which was completed two hours after its 6 p.m. UTC start time. The upgrade introduces a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets and is intended to reduce withdrawal delays. Base has generated cumulative revenue of more than $184 million since its H2 2023 debut and carries roughly $4 billion in total value locked, about half of which sits on the DeFi lending platform Morpho Blue. Other major networks have also faced outages this year: layer-1 chain Sui suffered back-to-back days of downtime in May following gas and validator bugs, while Solana has not reported a mainnet issue since February 2024.