Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Base stopped producing blocks for 33 minutes on Tuesday after switching to a backup sequencer that wasn’t arrange correctly to course of transactions.
The incident started at 6:07 am UTC when the energetic sequencer began falling behind on block manufacturing, prompting Conductor — Base’s system for managing sequencer availability and reliability — to modify sequencers.
Nonetheless, it switched to an “unhealthy mainnet sequencer” that was nonetheless being arrange and thus wasn’t capable of produce blocks, Base Construct’s X account mentioned in a put up on Tuesday.
Base creator Jesse Pollak mentioned the core crew responded to the difficulty instantly, with the community totally recovered by 6:40 am UTC. Slightly extra time was taken to make sure a series reorganization wasn’t required, Base mentioned in its autopsy.
Base remains to be extremely centralized
The incident exposes Base’s reliance on centralized sequencers to deal with transactions at scale. Whereas a number of sequencers run, they rely solely on Conductor’s administration capabilities — making a single level of failure that may halt your complete community.
The crew behind Base, which at the moment secures greater than $4.1 billion of whole worth locked, mentioned it could replace its infrastructure to make sure all sequencers within the cluster can deal with block-building tasks if chosen.
Base’s solely different main community outage occurred on Sept. 5, 2023 — shortly after its public launch — the place block manufacturing was halted for 43 minutes.
Accountability taken by Base chief
Base’s head of engineering, who goes by “aflock” on X, mentioned that Base takes chain uptime very critically whereas including that it could possibly’t “energy a world economic system with out a strong spine of a community.”
“Happy with the crew for the fast response right here and glad we have discovered a number of methods to harden our methods going ahead.”
Base’s community outage bullish, apparently
Some crypto pundits considered Base’s outage as bullish, together with former Coinbase engineer and Save Finance founder, 0xrooter, who mentioned: “individuals solely make a fuss about downtime for chains with precise customers.”
“Bullish downtime,” the pseudonymous developer added.
Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz in contrast the incident to Solana, one other high-speed blockchain that has had its justifiable share of community outages over time.
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Regardless of the safety challenges, Solana and Base stay among the many most used blockchains for retail customers, boasting the primary and fourth most energetic addresses at 2.83 million and 1.09 million, respectively, DefiLlama information exhibits.
Solana is the second-largest chain by DeFi TVL at $9.6 billion, whereas Base sits at sixth.
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