Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-two network Base stopped producing blocks for about 2 hours on June 25. The key question is what happened, and what it says about operational risk on major scaling networks.
Base said the halt was tied to a consensus issue after an invalid block was sequenced, meaning the network’s systems could not agree on the next valid block to add. That stalled transaction processing and left applications on the chain stuck until block production resumed.
Jesse Pollak said user funds remained safe during the incident, but a 2-hour stoppage is still a meaningful disruption: deposits can be delayed, token transfers can hang, and businesses relying on the network for payments or trading are left waiting for finality.
The outage also came as Base rolled out Beryl, an upgrade completed after recovery that introduced the B20 token standard and shortened a common withdrawal delay from 7 days to 5 days. The next checkpoint is Base’s full post-mortem. Until that arrives, the incident is a reminder that for production infrastructure, reliability matters just as much as new features.