Base Ethereum Layer 2 Chain Hit by Consensus Issue Outage

Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) chain incubated by Coinbase, has faced issues accepting deposits and withdrawals for nearly two days. The problem started on June 25th at 17:21 UTC when a consensus issue caused an invalid block to be sequenced.

The team isolated and debugged the problem but announced that a broader recovery was underway. However, as of June 26th at 10:36 UTC, the issue had not been fully resolved, with the mainnet block product indicating 'unhealthy' status.

Withdrawals were partially degraded, while deposits faced a major outage. Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Base, assured users that their funds were safe and promised a full post-mortem analysis.

Pollak emphasized that halting the chain was undesirable, saying 'a halt is not okay.' He added that they would use this experience to improve the platform for global, 24/7 finance. The incident comes as Base bets big on tokenization with DeFi-like borrowing and lending options for tokenized assets.