Base, the Layer 2 blockchain built by Coinbase, witnessed a 33 minute outage on early Tuesday morning, due to a sequencer handoff failure. The problem began at around 6:07 a.m. UTC and affected deposits, withdrawals, and block production on the mainnet.
In an official postmortem report, the Base team explained that the issue came from a sequencer handoff that failed. For a blockchain network, sequencers are responsible for creating blocks and handling transactions. In the case of the Base outage, the active sequencer started to fall behind because of rising on-chain activity.
To solve this, the system tried to switch control using a tool called Conductor, which manages sequencer reliability. But the new sequencer it switched to was still being set up and could not produce blocks, which caused the network to stop producing blocks.
Centralization Concerns and Industry Response
Base’s creator Jesse Pollak said that the network had a 33 minute halt and the core team acted quickly and resolved the issue.
Currently, Base depends on a single system, Conductor, to manage its sequencer cluster. If it fails, the whole network could pause. Although more than one sequencer runs, they all rely on Conductors to be elected and stay active.
The Base team said it will now update its infrastructure to make sure any sequencer that joins the cluster can take over leadership without delay if elected. Base currently secures around $4.1 billion in total value locked, according to DefiLlama.
Second Halt on Base Blockchain
This was Base’s second major network halt. The first happened on September 5, 2023, shortly after launch, when the network was down for 43 minutes.
Even with the recent failure, some industry members saw it as a sign of success. Former Coinbase engineer and Save Finance Founder, ‘0xrooter’, said on X, “People only make a fuss about downtime for chains with actual users. Bullish downtime.”
Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz compared the incident to similar problems seen on Solana. Both chains are popular with users. Solana is now the second-largest DeFi chain with $9.6 billion in total value locked. Base is sixth with $4.1 billion. In terms of active users, Solana has 2.83 million addresses, while Base has 1.09 million, as per DefiLlama data.
Also Read: Coinbase Plans Raising $2 Billion Through Convertible Notes
