Blockchain developed by Coinbase suffers first failure

Not much time has passed, and the distributed ledger created by the largest American cryptocurrency exchange is experiencing its first difficulties.

The blockchain network from the American digital currency exchange Coinbase, called Base, experienced its first major failure. This is because on September 5 there was an outage in operation, as a result of which the process of creating new blocks in the chain stopped for less than an hour. It is worth answering the question how did this happen?

The Base network feels its first troubles

Base, a layer 2 network that was built by the Coinbase exchange on the Ethereum blockchain, after only a month to its public launch, experienced its first major failure.

A few days ago, on September 5, for about 45 minutes, no new blocks were produced to be added to the chain. Developers responsible for the supervision and development of this project realized that there was a network outage at 21:36 EST. The technical team quickly dealt with this obstacle and the Base was able to quickly resume operation.

For some time, however, it was not known what was the exact cause of this failure? It turned out that the developers uploaded one of the patches to the network protocol too quickly.

– After analyzing a number of data, we found a delay in the production of blocks, which was primarily caused by the need to refresh part of our internal infrastructure. After identifying the causes of the phenomenon, we implemented the amendment and at this stage we are observing a widespread recovery.

Some analysts of the digital currency sector are increasingly asking themselves whether it is worth relying on the reliability of Layer 2 blockchains? Recently, Matt Willemsen, who is the director of the research department at the Collective Shift platform, shared his opinion on this topic. The man directly stated that such projects at the current stage of adaptation of the industry are not as well "tested in battle" as is the case with the main layer of Ethereum.

Base hotbed of scammers?

Although the blockchain network developed by programmers associated with the Coinbase exchange operated for only 3 weeks during August, it managed to become a popular environment for carrying out cryptocurrency scams.

This happened because it was on this blockchain that illegal activities such as scams, exploits, rug pulls were recorded. It is worth noting that this took place in the case of as many as four projects. Thus, Base itself is in a row with projects such as Ethereum and BNB Chain, if we analyze it in terms of the most frequently attacked networks during the past month. Users of the cryptocurrency sector should be aware that 62% of attacks in August were carried out on these three networks.

One of the most interesting fraudulent cases is the rug pull from the Magnate Finance project reported two weeks ago. This is due to the simple fact that over $6.5 million in digital currencies has been stolen in this case.