Base outage highlights growing pains of a chain with real users
A 29-minute halt in block production briefly froze Base, but DeFi dodged the bullet
Roberto Sorin/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
Early Tuesday morning, Coinbase’s Base network experienced a rare outage, halting block production for about 33 minutes. The root cause, classified on Base’s status page as an “unsafe head delay,” was quickly identified and resolved by the Base team.
The cause was “an unexpected issue during an automated system switch,” a Base spokesperson told Blockworks, adding, “we’re close to a long-term fix.”
At around 2:15 am ET, BaseScan detected the final block stuck at height 33,792,704. With no new blocks for over 19 minutes, developers and users alike raised concerns across social channels. But the tone wasn’t all negative.
As Save and Suilend protocol founder Rooter quipped: “People only make a fuss about downtime for chains with actual users. Bullish downtime.”
They may have a point, and the incident naturally spawned comparisons to Solana’s growing pains.
Base’s recent momentum is one of the reasons people take notice of a snafu. The July rollout of new Base App — Coinbase’s ambitious attempt to create a crypto super app — has turned Base into one of the most active layer-2s of late. By combining wallet, social, payments, and mini-app functionality, Base App draws parallels to a crypto-native spin on WeChat.
Blockworks data confirms the surge in onchain activity. Daily token launches on Zora spiked to nearly 40,000, with 15–50% of that volume attributed to Base App users — up sharply from around 4,000 daily average prior to launch.
Breaking out creator rewards on Zora shows daily payouts exceeding $33k as of Aug. 4, with a surge in token activity and engagement following the Base App launch.
Blockworks charts also show sustained creator monetization through content coin trading, validating broader adoption.
The app leverages Farcaster, Zora, and Noice, a mini-app, to blend content creation, tipping, and tokenization. Meanwhile, Base Pay — a USDC-powered tap-to-pay system — brings a strong offering to the competitive crypto payments space. A planned 1% cashback incentive for USDC payments on Shopify aims to sweeten the deal.
Critically, Base App relies on account abstraction to onboard users without private keys or manual signatures. Wallets can be spun up with just an email, via Privy, and gas fees are abstracted away or sponsored.
Tuesday’s downtime doesn’t negate Base’s progress. Unlike other chains that stall with barely a whisper, Base’s outage sparked immediate attention precisely because users rely on it.
At the same time, the outage caused minimal disruption to DeFi protocols. Lending platforms like Aave, Morph, and Moonwell were temporarily frozen due to Chainlink’s Sequencer Uptime Feed disabling price updates, which successfully prevented mispriced liquidations. Once block production resumed, liquidation bots processed queued positions with no bad debt reported.
Overall, the incident demonstrated effective circuit breakers and risk management across Base DeFi.
Updated August 5, 2025 at 11:03 am ET: Added data for clarity.
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