On February 13, Coinbase outlined three major strategic directions for 2026 in its shareholder letter: developing a comprehensive trading platform, expanding stablecoin payments, and “onboarding the world to the blockchain.” Within this ambitious blueprint, the Base network is positioned as the core infrastructure for enabling onchain experiences. However, just two weeks ago, Base experienced a large-scale transaction delay and loss issue that affected the entire network. On one hand, there is the grand narrative of bringing billions of users into the crypto world; on the other, users repeatedly complain, “Why are transfers still so slow?” This tension is no coincidence—when a publicly traded company positions an L2 network as its strategic core, a configuration change on that network is no longer just an internal matter for the technical team, but a public incident capable of shaking investor confidence.
A Configuration Change That Exposed Vulnerability
On the afternoon of January 31, an engineer responsible for operating and maintaining the Base network at Coinbase executed a routine configuration change regarding transaction propagation. After the change was deployed, block builders began repeatedly pulling the same set of stale transactions—transactions that could not be executed due to a rapid increase in the base fee at the time. The block builders became stuck in idle mode, executable transactions could not be included in blocks, and users widely experienced unresponsive submissions, timeouts, and lost transactions.
The official post-mortem acknowledged that the incident was not due to capacity issues, but a logical error. The configuration change inadvertently created a feedback loop: the less valid transactions were fetched, the higher the fetch frequency became; the higher the fetch frequency, the harder it became for valid transactions to enter the mempool. The fix was to directly roll back the change. The network quickly recovered and stabilized, but the logic that caused the congestion was not refactored—it was merely reverted.
Base’s incident review stated: “During network congestion, transaction submission may still occasionally experience delays or loss.” The implication of this statement is that the root cause of the issue has not been eradicated. The long-term optimizations promised by Coinbase are expected to take about a month—from February 4, they should be completed by early March.
Misalignment Between Strategic Core and Engineering Shortcomings
Just two weeks after the incident, Coinbase listed “onboarding the world to the blockchain” as one of its three annual priorities, and explicitly stated its goal to “expand Base applications” and “make onchain experiences simpler and more accessible.” The premise for this narrative to hold is that Base can deliver a stable and smooth user experience.
However, the reality is that Base’s TVL now accounts for 47.6% of the total value locked in the Ethereum L2 market, nearly double that of Arbitrum, the second-largest player—yet its underlying stability can still be brought to a global halt by a single configuration change. This is not a consensus layer vulnerability, nor a smart contract hack; it is an operational error made by an engineer at a publicly traded company in their daily work. The fix was a rollback, not a refactoring.
When “greater usage relies on Coinbase’s infrastructure” is written into a shareholder letter, investors have every reason to ask: Has this infrastructure’s ability to defend against its own operational mistakes kept pace with its market size and strategic importance?
Coinbase’s 2026 strategy is clear and its direction is well-defined—but the execution of strategy never depends on slogans; it depends on the performance of specific products at specific moments. Base’s performance over the past month shows that this much-heralded onchain infrastructure is still in transition from “operational” to “reliable.”
If users still have to worry about lag or lost transactions every time they transfer during peak hours, if a single configuration change can delay an entire network’s transactions, then “onboarding the world to the blockchain” is less an executable plan than a promise yet to be fulfilled. Coinbase has committed to completing the transaction pipeline refactoring by early March. Whether Base can truly break free from the cycle of being “fixed but not fully fixed” will determine the credibility of this strategic narrative.
