Base, a Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) chain, has faced a prolonged outage, unable to process deposits or withdrawals for nearly 48 hours.
On June 25 at 17:21 UTC, the team reported a consensus issue that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. Initially, the problem was isolated and debugging began, with an announcement that recovery was underway. But by June 26 at 10:36 UTC, the issue had not been fully resolved. The chain’s status showed that mainnet block production was “unhealthy.”
Deposits were hit with a “major outage,” while withdrawals were only partially degraded. Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Base, assured users that funds remained safe and that a full post-mortem was being prepared. He stated that halting the chain to fix the problem was undesirable, calling it a challenge to improve future operations.
“All funds are 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,” Pollak said.
Tokenization ambitions
Separately, Pollak indicated that Base plans to offer DeFi-like borrowing and lending options for tokenized assets once they go live on the chain. This move is part of a broader bet on tokenization, a segment gaining traction. However, a chain disruption like this one does not inspire confidence for such a goal.
Base launched in the second half of 2023 and has grown rapidly. It has accumulated over $184 million in cumulative revenue, with a total locked value (TVL) of $4 billion, according to DeFiLlama. Half of that TVL sits in the DeFi lending platform Morpho Blue. Whether this outage will shake investor trust and trigger outflows remains an open question.
