On September 5th, the Ethereum Layer-2 network Base had some growing pains, going through an outage that lasted 30 minutes before being fully restored.
“We had a delay in block production due in part to our internal infrastructure requiring a refresh. The issue has been identified and remediated. No funds are at risk.” Base commented on Twitter.
The development team noted that “users may have issues submitting transactions” at 5:36 p.m. ET on Tuesday, which is listed as a “Base chain stall” on the project status page. By the time the problem was discovered and a solution created—14 minutes later—Base was “starting to see recovery of block production and gossip.” Exchanges of state information between nodes constitute gossip.
Despite “widespread recovery,” a persistent problem with remote procedure calls (RPCs) made it take until 6:06 p.m., 90 minutes after the inquiry started, for an all-clear report to be issued.
The outage was exploited by Matt Willemsen, head of research at the cryptocurrency analytics company Collective Shift, to emphasize that Ethereum layer-2 solutions are not Ethereum.
“Another reminder that using Ethereum L2s (e.g. Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, zkSync Era, Base) is not the same as using Ethereum mainnet, which is more battle-tested and involves fewer trust assumptions,” he tweeted on Twitter. “I’m not saying don’t use L2s, of course—but just know what you’re dealing with.”
The Base mainnet debuted barely a month ago after being nurtured to life by exchange behemoth Coinbase. Even though it is still relatively new, Base has experienced rapid growth, most recently recording daily transaction volumes higher than its Ethereum basis. According to DeFi Llama data, Base has reportedly made $6 million in protocol fees, in part because of its popularity among memecoin users.
Recently, Base confirmed native support for USDC and connections with Ledger Live and the decentralized exchange PancakeSwap. A variety of popular consumer brands, including Chainlink, Aragon, and Base, have struck relationships with the company.
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