Did Centralization Cause the Base Blockchain Outage?

While one network (Base) faced an outage, another (Ethereum) had a layer 2 leader grappling with the idea of an “Ethereum Supreme Court.”

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ABOUT

On “Carpe Consensus,” host Danny Nelson is joined by CoinDesk tech reporter Sam Kessler to dive into the latest blockchain news.

[0:53] Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2 blockchain Base experienced its first major outage since its launch, halting the production of new blocks for about 45 minutes. Sam explains what caused the outage and other vulnerabilities he’s watching.
[13:16] In crypto, the phrase “code is law” seems to assert that technology can thwart centralized individuals. But a proposal for an “Ethereum Supreme Court” gets Danny and Sam thinking – are blockchains already just social contracts, not straight code as we’ve been led to believe?

“Carpe Consensus” is executive produced by Jared Schwartz and produced and edited by Eleanor Pahl.

HOSTS

Dan Ilett

Dan Ilett writes on tech, money and energy. He advises business on digital strategy and technology messaging for large deals. He is founder of Erbut - an advisory company - and Greenbang - a smart technology research company.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury has been a professional writer since 1989, and has worked freelance since 1994. He covers technology for publications such as the Guardian.

EPISODES