‘Halt is not okay’ – All about Base and its consensus problem

Base, a Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) chain, has been unable to accept deposits or withdrawals for nearly 48 hours.

On the 25th of June, the L2 said that it ran into a consensus issue that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. The statement was given on 25th June, 17:21 UTC. The problem was isolated and debugged, and the team soon announced that broader recovery was underway.

However, as of 26th June, 10:36 UTC, the issue had not been fully resolved. In fact, the chain’s status indicated that the mainnet block product was “unhealthy.”

Apart from the block production, deposits and withdrawals were also affected for the second day. Notably, withdrawals were only partially degraded, but deposits were facing a “major outage.”

For his part, Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Base, assured users that funds were safe and that they were working on a full post-mortem.

He added that halting the chain to remedy the issue was undesirable and would act as a challenge to do better in the future.

All funds are/were safe. But a halt is not okay, and we’ll use this to continue to level up Base as a platform for global, 24/7 finance. Thank you for your patience.

Base’s bet on tokenization

Separately, Pollak has indicated that Base will allow a DeFi-like borrowing and lending option for tokenized assets once they go live on the chain.

This is part of a broader bet on tokenization as the nascent segment gains traction. Unfortunately, a chain disruption like the recent one is not a good look for such a goal.

That said, Base debuted in H2 2023 and has grown immensely over the past few months. It has done a cumulative revenue of over $184M with a total locked value (TVL) of $4B.

Source: DeFiLlama

Half the locked $4B value is on the DeFi lending platform Morpho Blue. Whether the ongoing outage will dent investor confidence and trigger outflows remains to be seen.

Final Summary

• Base chain faced a consensus problem that has partially degraded withdrawals and disabled deposits.
• Jesse Pollak, Base co-founder, is betting big on tokenized assets with DeFi-like lending and borrowing options