Svmuu News: On-chain analyst Vadim noted in a post that Base experienced a consensus vulnerability today that resulted in a single invalid block. Block production ceased entirely after block height 47806542, causing the network to be down for nearly two hours. Since Base employs a single-sequencer architecture, when that node fails, the entire network ceases to function; there are no backup block producers or other validator nodes capable of bypassing the failure to maintain on-chain activity. During this outage, users were unable to conduct transactions, liquidate positions, or make withdrawals.
Furthermore, the network recovery process did not occur automatically; block synchronization gradually resumed only after node operators in the ecosystem manually restarted their nodes. This is not the first time Base has experienced a similar issue; last August, Base also suffered a network freeze lasting approximately 33 minutes due to a failure during a sequencer switch. The single-sequencer model exposes the centralization risks inherent in some current L2 networks: while they offer higher speeds, the entire chain may cease to function due to a single point of failure when a core component malfunctions.