Leading American crypto exchange Coinbase is having issues again Wednesday—but while other recent instances were blamed on a surge in crypto trading activity amid Bitcoin's rise to a new all-time high price, this wave of problems is being blamed on Base, the Ethereum scaling network that Coinbase itself incubated.
"Due to network congestion on the Base network, transactions on Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase.com may experience intermittent failures," Coinbase's status page reads. "If your transaction is not confirmed by the network, please wait or submit your transaction again on Coinbase.com. We advise that Coinbase Wallet customers wait for congestion to resolve before submitting transactions on the Base network."
Following the initial publication of this story, Coinbase representatives sent the following statement to Decrypt:
"Due to high network traffic on the Base network, transaction fees increased over the last 24 hours. Some user transactions that were submitted with lower fees may be stuck in a 'pending' state. If possible, users with pending transactions should cancel their transaction and resubmit with the latest estimated gas fee. If you are unable to cancel your pending transaction, the transaction will complete once traffic subsides. Rest assured, your funds are safe. Pending transactions will process once fees reduce. The Coinbase Wallet team is working on implementing a transaction cancellation feature, and will provide an update once available."
Base transactions have spiked dramatically in recent days following last week's launch of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, which promised to cut transaction fees on layer-2 scaling networks. Indeed, Base—which is based on Optimism's scaling tech—has seen a dramatic decrease in fees, falling by 90% or more alongside some other networks.
Public blockchain data curated by Dune shows a sizable leap on transaction volume on Base, rising from a daily average of about 400,000 daily transactions before the Dencun upgrade to a million or more each of the last several days. Base hit a new daily transaction record of 2.12 million on Saturday.
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.