Coinbase-backed layer-1 blockchain Base’s highly-anticipated Beryl mainnet upgrade has been delayed until Friday, June 26, 18:00 UTC. The upgrade, initially scheduled to go live on Thursday, had to be postponed to ensure the hard fork’s underlying B20 Activation Registry is fully operational before activation.
Base delays Beryl mainnet upgrade
According to Base, the delay is due to a timing issue that is central to the Beryl hard fork’s technical architecture. Specifically, until the B20 Activation Registry goes live, developers will be unable to deploy tokens on Base’s new native B20 token standard.
The Activation Registry essentially provides the confirmation whether B20’s feature flags are live or not. Notably, this Activation Registry can take as much as 1 hour to fully come online after the hard fork is activated at the protocol level.
On Thursday, Base’s mainnet encountered a 2-hour long block production outage that brought the blockchain to a standstill. In the post-mortem report, it came to light that the outage was due to consensus failure that caused an invalid block to enter the sequencing pipeline.
As reported on Friday, Base’s Beryl upgrade is its second independent network upgrade. Beryl follows the Azul network upgrade which went live on May 30.
What does the Beryl upgrade bring?
Besides the B20 token standard, Base’s Beryl upgrade offers a plethora of technological advancements to the blockchain. For instance, it will allow the network users to pay transaction fees in the form of a token of their choice.
Further, the Beryl upgrade will also give the Base blockchain the ability to create unique deposit addresses that can be forwarded to a shared account. It also promises 50 percent cheaper token transfer fees.
In addition, the upgrade reduces the standard single-proof withdrawal delay from Base to the Ethereum network from 7 days to 5 days. Finally, it also leverages Reth V2 which is speculated to reduce node storage overhead by almost 50 percent.
Following the successful roll-out of the Beryl upgrade, the team at Base will start preparing for the next major upgrade dubbed Cobalt. The third independent network upgrade is expected to be implemented in September 2026, and will introduce native account abstraction to the blockchain.
