# Base publishes postmortem on severe transaction drops and inclusion delays

> Base rolled back the transaction-propagation configuration change identified as the immediate cause and committed to mempool-pipeline, alerting, and change-monitoring improvements. The event added a significant realized availability failure to canonical-bridge operational diligence.

- URL: https://riadefi.com/on-chain/2026-02-03-coinbase-bridge-base-mainnet-transaction-drops-postmortem/
- Type: Market stress
- Stage: Postmortem
- Evidence: confirmed
- Materiality: material
- Event date: 2026-02-03
- Version: 1, published 2026-08-22 (first published 2026-08-22)
- Follow-up: 2026-03-03
- Advisor-relevant: yes
- Affects: Base canonical bridge (protocol)

## What happened

Base published a postmortem for a January 31 period of severe mainnet transaction drops, inclusion latency, and some block-production delays under high transaction load.

## What changed

Base rolled back the transaction-propagation configuration change identified as the immediate cause and committed to mempool-pipeline, alerting, and change-monitoring improvements. The event added a significant realized availability failure to canonical-bridge operational diligence.

## What did not change

The postmortem did not report a canonical-bridge contract exploit, asset loss, withdrawal-rule change, challenge-period change, or continuing impairment after the rollback.

## Confirmed

- Base estimates that approximately 20% of submitted transactions landed on-chain during the acute incident window.
- Base reports 2.1 million dropped transactions and 512,000 transactions included in blocks.
- Approximately 2% of blocks during the reported window took longer than two seconds to build.
- Base attributed the incident to an interaction between a transaction-propagation queue-size change, rising base fees, and mempool-client behavior.
- The mitigation was to roll back the configuration change, after which Base reported restored network stability.

## Still open

- The postmortem lists 19:17–20:41 UTC as the incident endpoints but calls that interval two hours and 26 minutes; those figures are arithmetically inconsistent.
- The record does not identify how many canonical-bridge deposits, proofs, or withdrawal transactions were delayed or dropped.
- Completion and effectiveness of the promised mempool-pipeline and monitoring improvements were not established by the postmortem.

## What it means for an advisor

- Review the Coinbase Bridge memo's sequencer, mempool, block-builder, RPC, retry, and transaction-inclusion assumptions.
- Preserve transaction resubmission, alternate-RPC, nonce-management, and status-monitoring procedures for bridge operations during congestion.
- The resolved event does not independently fire a bridge-contract loss criterion, but recurrence should inform operational limits and exit planning.

## Sources

1. [High Rate of Transaction Drops and Transaction Inclusion Delays](https://status.base.org/incidents/zfvvgt46j9d8) · Base Status · 2026-02-03


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Published by Ketju Research on RIADeFi (https://riadefi.com). Educational research for financial professionals; not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.