Base delays Beryl upgrade to June 26 for B20 registry readiness
Base, the Ethereum layer 2 network built by Coinbase, has delayed its Beryl mainnet upgrade by 24 hours. The hard fork, originally scheduled for June 25, will now activate on June 26 at 18:00 UTC. The reason for the delay is a timing dependency with the B20 Activation Registry. According to a post on base docs, that registry must finish its initialization process before developers can deploy native B20 tokens. The Activation Registry controls whether B20 feature flags become available after the upgrade comes online. It can take up to one hour for the registry to start after activation. So Base decided it needed the extra day.
What Beryl brings to the network
Beryl is Base’s second independent network upgrade. The first one, Azul, went live on mainnet in May. Beryl introduces B20. That is a new token standard built at the protocol level. It lets issuers create stablecoins and real-world asset tokens directly inside Base’s node software. That’s different from deploying standard ERC-20 smart contracts. Base says B20 remains compatible with the ERC-20 specification. It also supports ERC-2612 permit functionality. That means existing wallets, exchanges, and indexers should work without any changes. The system includes an Issuer Toolkit with role-based permissions, mint and burn controls, transfer restrictions, optional supply limits, and even freeze and seizure features for regulated issuers.
Faster withdrawals and lower storage requirements
The hard fork also shortens the standard withdrawal time from Base to Ethereum. It will drop from seven days to five days for the route most bridging providers use. Base says this improvement came from Azul’s Multiproofs framework. That framework reduced the reliance on the original fault-proof challenge window. Beryl also integrates Reth V2. Base claims this reduces storage needs for nodes by up to 50 percent. It also supports higher block gas targets.
Network outage just before the upgrade
Base originally planned to activate Beryl on June 25. That same day, the network experienced a block production outage. It lasted nearly two hours. The engineering team found a consensus issue. An invalid block entered the sequencing pipeline, which temporarily stopped new blocks from being created. Engineers later restored normal production. Base confirmed the outage was not related to the Beryl upgrade. Block production resumed, and nodes recovered. Base’s creator, Jesse Pollak, said user funds were safe during the outage. But he admitted network halts are not acceptable for infrastructure that supports global financial activity. The team plans to share a full post-mortem later.
Looking ahead to Cobalt
Base has already scheduled its next network upgrade, Cobalt, for September. That release is expected to include native account abstraction, protocol-level smart accounts, gas sponsorship, transaction batching, additional B20 capabilities, and a unified node binary that combines consensus and execution clients.
