Base by Coinbase Faces Outage: Assurance of Fund Safety from the Team

The Ethereum Layer-2 network Base faced some challenges today, encountering an outage that persisted for thirty minutes and required an additional half-hour to completely resolve.

“We experienced a lag in block production primarily due to our internal infrastructure needing a refresh,” Base announced on Twitter. “The problem has been recognized and addressed. No assets are endangered.”

Listed as a “Base chain stall” on the project status page, the development team noted “users may encounter difficulties submitting transactions” at 5:36 p.m. ET on Tuesday. The problem was diagnosed, and a solution was found 14 minutes later, and by 6:09 p.m., Base was “beginning to observe recovery in block production and gossip.” Gossip refers to node-to-node sharing of state information.

Despite “widespread recovery,” a persistent issue with remote procedure calls (RPCs) delayed the issuance of an all-clear report until 6:06 p.m., an hour and a half after the inquiry started.

Matt Willemsen, research director at crypto analytics company Collective Shift, leveraged the outage to emphasize that Ethereum layer-2 solutions are distinct from Ethereum.

“This serves as another reminder that utilizing Ethereum L2s (e.g. Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, zkSync Era, Base) is not equivalent to leveraging Ethereum mainnet, which has undergone more rigorous testing and entails fewer trust assumptions,” he posted on Twitter. “I’m not suggesting to avoid L2s entirely, but just understand what you are engaging with.”

Brought to life by exchange behemoth Coinbase, the Base mainnet debuted less than a month ago. Despite its infancy, Base has witnessed remarkable growth, recently recording daily transaction volumes surpassing those of its Ethereum foundation. According to DeFi Llama data, Base has reportedly accumulated $6 million in protocol fees, partially spurred by its appeal among the memecoin community.

In the past week alone, Base revealed native support for USDC and its partnerships with Ledger Live and the PancakeSwap decentralized exchange. Additionally, Base has formed alliances with Chainlink, Aragon, and a variety of prominent consumer brands.

Today’s event marks the initial significant technical setback for Base. The outage led to numerous comparisons with other blockchain solutions and their relative reliability, including Solana, where outages have reached meme status.