The block production in the Coinbase base network (COIN) stopped for 33 minutes on Tuesday after a switching for a sequencing error that did not recover as expected, developers said in a post mortem report on Wednesday.
The interruption began at 06:07 UTC on August 5, when the active sequencer was left behind due to the congestion of the activity in the chain. Although the base driver module, a central component of the OP stack designed to maintain activity time, correctly tried to change the leadership to a reserve sequencer, the new instance had not been completely supplied and could not produce blocks.
A sequencer organizes transactions to be placed in blocks. The system correctly tried to deliver responsibility to a backup sequencer, but that backup was not yet completely ready and could not produce blocks.
As it could not change automatically, the production stagnated until the engineers manually solved the problem. The network was completely recovered at 06:40, according to the report.
To avoid reorganization risks, that is, when a blockchain temporarily rewrites the history by replacing the blocks confirmed by the alternatives, the team stopped the driver and coordinated a controlled leadership transition. This process contributed to the duration of the interruption.
As such, the interruption highlighted a key operational risk in the accumulation networks of layer 2 that are based on centralized sequencers to order and send transactions. These systems continue to depend on rapid commutation mechanisms by error and complete supply, and a single point gap in this chain can lead to complete network stalls.
Base said that it will implement changes in the infrastructure to ensure that all sequencers added to the cluster are ready for drivers, even before the choice, and will prioritize the improved test coverage to validate this logic.
The incident follows the previous detainees in other OP Stack chains and occurs just when base has seen record traffic of new tokens and NFT launches linked to chain social applications such as Farcaster and Zora.
Read more: Network base suffers the first time of inactivity since 2023, it stops operations for 29 minutes
