Coinbase Layer-2 Base Suffers 'Chain Stall,' Issue Resolved In 45 Minutes

Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network, experienced a major 45-minute-long outage this week, before it was resolved by the team, which assured the crypto community no funds were put at risk because of the technical problem.

"Earlier today we had a delay in block production due in part to our internal infrastructure requiring a refresh," Base said in a Wednesday tweet, before adding, "The issue has been identified and remediated. No funds are at risk."

Base's tweet surfaced after a "Chain Stall" was reported on the blockchain's status tracker.

At around 5:36 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the tracker shared Base was looking into a stall in the network's production block, adding, "Users may have issues submitting transactions."

Before 6:00 p.m. the tracker updated the team has "deployed a fix and are starting to see recovery of block production and gossip."

The term gossip is the node-to-node exchange of state information.

While the Base chain seemed to have been fixed at the time, issues centered on remote procedure calls (RPC) on the mainnet still remained.

Fortunately, after roughly an hour and thirty minutes, Base announced it had "verified recovery of network health and RPC APIs."

A few hours later, it tweeted the network's status, while pinning the blame on internal infrastructure.

It was worth noting that this was the first major outage Base experienced since its launch in mid-July.

CShift.io head of research Matt Willemsen advised the community that using layer-2 networks like Base, Arbitrum and zkSync is not like using Ethereum mainnet, which is more battle-tested and has fewer assumptions.

"Coinbase's Base chain just had its first major outage, lasting for 43 minutes. Blocks have just started to be produced again," the head of research said in a tweet.

"Another reminder that using Ethereum L2s (e.g. Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, zkSync Era, Base) is NOT the same as using Ethereum mainnet, which is more battle-tested and involves fewer trust assumptions," he said, adding, "I'm not saying don't use L2s, of course! But just know what you're dealing with."

In a report shared by cryptocurrency aggregator CoinGecko, it labeled Base as the fastest-growing layer-2 in terms of gaining 1 million unique addresses in just 11 days.

"The Coinbase-supported network managed to reach 1 million addresses in 11 days from its official launch. Base mainnet was officially launched on August 9, 2023, though users were able to bridge a week before the launch. Its successful adoption can be partially attributed to a wave of memecoins, some of which gained popularity, such as Bald (BALD), which reached over $100 million in market cap at its peak," the report said.