Ethereum’s L2 Base Testnet Has Crashed

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Key Points:

Coinbase’s Base testnet on Ethereum crashed a few hours after launch.
The error occurred because the Coinbase wallet incorrectly estimated the gas fees required to execute the user’s transactions.
The community was also displeased when the Base team changed its original commitment to donate 20% of its revenue to fund public goods, but then removed it.

Hours after Coinbase released the Base testnet of the Ethereum L2 network, the network crashed, sending users flooding social media to complain about the network’s functionality.

Twitter user @0xfoobar attached a screenshot of the Etherscan transaction list and said: “Base’s bridging got off to a rough start. Every transaction has been rolled back, and the bridging contracts haven’t been verified, so no one can figure out what happened.”

base's bridge is off to a rough start, every single transaction reverting and the bridge contract is unverified so nobody can figure out what's going on pic.twitter.com/2MiFZrMNfj
— foobar (@0xfoobar) February 23, 2023

However, some of those transactions appear to have been rolled back. Coinbase said an issue caused the operational glitch on the test network with its wallet.

The Coinbase wallet incorrectly estimated the gas fees required to execute users’ transactions. As a result, the user pays less gas than is needed to complete the transaction, which causes Base to revert these transactions instead of processing them.

Coinbase software engineer Roberto Bayardo explained on Twitter a few hours after the release: “Should fix now. Demand contracts increase gas usage under load, which wallets don’t estimate accurately. Gas limits are now hardcoded higher.”

Should be fixed now… the bridge contracts bump up gas usage under load which wallets weren't properly estimating. Hardcoded a higher gas limit. There are still some other limits that could still get hit — people (& bots?) are bridging like mad it seems. https://t.co/t0zXxAo7cp
— Roberto Bayardo | bayardo.eth (@roberto_bayardo) February 23, 2023

According to Bayardo, the sudden increase in users may have overloaded the protocol and was one of the causes of the crash on the day of the testnet’s launch.

Additionally, one Twitter user discovered that the Base team had initially pledged on their website to donate 20% of Sequencer’s revenue to “finance public goods,” but later removed the billions percentage and updated that Base will contribute an undisclosed amount to the public good, or “a portion of the Sequencer’s revenue.”

A Coinbase representative said the 20% figure was removed from Base’s website as it worked with Optimism Collective to finalize the revenue allocated to public goods.

Before that, the new Centralized Protocol Base on Ethereum formed an integral part of Coinbase’s strategy to direct its business into the developer space. But it has not met the expectations of users.

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