Coinbase’s Base Experiences Its First Major Outage

Coinbase’s layer-2 project, Base, which launched in August, experienced a significant outage on September 5. During this incident, the blockchain network failed to produce new blocks for 43 minutes, with the issue being identified by developers at 9:36 PM UTC.

Matt Willemsen, head of research at the crypto education platform Collective Shift, pointed out in a post on X the contrasting usage patterns between Ethereum Layer 2 solutions and the Ethereum mainnet. He argued that the mainnet is more reliable and entails fewer trust assumptions.

Base is an initiative from Coinbase, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange globally. The project entered a beta phase on February 23, launched its mainnet for developers on July 13, and became available for users on August 9.

The primary objective of Coinbase Base is to tackle the challenges that users encounter on the Ethereum blockchain. It aims to create a more scalable environment for decentralized applications (dapps) by utilizing the OP Stack software from Optimism. This software facilitates transaction processing outside the primary Ethereum network, aiming for faster speeds and lower costs compared to Ethereum.

The Base ecosystem includes more than 100 dapps and service providers, allowing users to make payments with crypto, launch decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and engage with various cryptocurrency projects, including exchanges.

Additionally, Coca-Cola has recently rolled out its NFT collection on the Base platform.