Coinbase’s Layer 2 network, Base, went down twice in the span of 24 hours this week, with block production grinding to a halt on both June 25 and June 26. The timing could not have been worse: the outages forced a postponement of the Beryl hard fork and its marquee feature, the B20 Activation Registry.

No user funds were reported at risk during either incident.

What happened

The first outage hit at approximately 16:03 UTC on June 25, triggered by a consensus failure linked to an invalid block sequence detected after block height 47,806,542. Block production remained stalled for roughly two hours before the team restored operations.

Then it happened again. Around 15:34 UTC on June 26, a second halt struck with what appears to be a similar root cause. Recovery followed a comparable timeline, with blocks resuming shortly afterward. The development team has said it is actively investigating both incidents and preparing post-mortem analyses.

The Beryl upgrade, which was originally scheduled to go live on June 25, was pushed back to June 26 at 18:00 UTC. The team wanted to ensure the B20 Activation Registry was fully initialized before flipping the switch on new network features.

Jesse Pollak, Base’s lead builder, addressed the community during the disruptions by directing users to the network’s status page for real-time updates.

The Beryl upgrade and B20 standard

The Beryl hard fork introduces the B20 native token standard, a new framework designed to enable cheaper, higher-throughput token transfers while maintaining backward compatibility with ERC-20.

The upgrade also carries two other significant changes. Canonical withdrawal delays, the waiting period for moving assets from Base back to Ethereum mainnet, would shrink from seven days to five. And the integration of Reth V2 is expected to improve storage efficiency for node operators.

The sequencer problem

Base experienced a previous outage on August 5, 2025, that lasted approximately 29 to 33 minutes, also tied to sequencer issues during periods of peak activity.

Base runs on a centralized sequencer — the single entity responsible for ordering transactions and producing blocks. When it fails, the entire network stops. There is no fallback, no committee of validators that can pick up the slack.

Other networks built on the OP Stack, the modular framework developed by Optimism, share a similar centralized sequencer model.

What this means for investors

The market’s initial reaction was notably muted. Neither ETH nor Coinbase’s stock price showed immediate adverse effects from the outages.

Base has now experienced three notable outages in under a year. Each one has been linked to sequencer-related issues.

For developers and protocols building on Base, two hours of halted block production means two hours where positions can’t be adjusted, trades can’t execute, and liquidations can’t process.

The B20 token standard, which offers cheaper and faster token transfers with ERC-20 compatibility, will depend on whether developers trust the underlying network to stay online.