Base Layer 2 Chain Experiences Consensus Problem, Deposits Affected

Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) chain incubated by Coinbase, has been experiencing issues for nearly 48 hours. On June 25th at 17:21 UTC, Base announced a consensus problem that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. The team initially isolated and debugged the issue, but as of June 26th at 10:36 UTC, the problem still hadn't been fully resolved.

According to Base's status page, deposits were affected more severely than withdrawals, with a 'major outage' reported for deposits. Withdrawals, on the other hand, were only partially degraded. Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Base, assured users that their funds were safe and that the team was working on a full post-mortem analysis.

Pollak stated, 'A halt is not okay... We'll use this to continue to level up Base as a platform for global, 24/7 finance.' The outage has raised concerns about investor confidence in Base's tokenization plans. With a cumulative revenue of over $184M and a total locked value (TVL) of $4B, Base has been growing rapidly since its debut in H2 2023.

The majority of the locked $4B value is on the DeFi lending platform Morpho Blue. Whether this outage will impact investor confidence and lead to outflows remains to be seen.