Coinbase Warns of Base Network Congestion, High Fee Menace

According to a published Status Update, there has been an increase in transaction fees on the Base Network owing to another Coinbase congestion saga. 

Coinbase Congestion Triggers High Gas Fee

The American cryptocurrency exchange shared an update informing its users of the sudden high network traffic on the Ethereum-based Layer-2 protocol causing an equally high transaction fee. Consequently, Coinbase clarified that some user transactions that were earlier submitted with lower fees may be kept on “pending” status. 

Any user who comes across such a situation is advised to cancel it and resubmit with the newly stated transaction gas fee. Those who are unable to cancel their transactions would be required to wait until the Coinbase congestion reduces when the transaction will be completed at the initial subsidized rate. Furthermore, the exchange assured users of the safety of their assets.

On its own, the Coinbase Wallet team is trying to activate a “cancel” feature for all pending transactions but it is yet to be finalized. The exchange perceives that some of its services including Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase.com may be impacted by the congestion, hence, users are advised to remain patient. 

This Coinbase congestion may not come as a surprise to many users of the platform considering that there have recently been a couple of outages in the exchange’s ecosystem.

Coinbase Outages Becoming Too Frequent

While Bitcoin’s (BTC) price was growing last month, several Coinbase users found themselves staring at a $0 balance in their accounts. It turned out to be an outage that wiped a staggering $100 billion in Bitcoin market cap within a mere 15 minutes. The Coinbase team claimed to have fixed the issue but it wasn’t long before another outage hit the protocol.

Earlier this month when Bitcoin hit an all-time high (ATH), Coinbase experienced another outage making it the third in the space of two weeks. This led to an accusation from crypto commentator MartyParty who said the exchange has constantly chosen to use inferior tooling and technologies that are fragile to high volume.

However, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong claimed that it was only a problem of improving the existing infrastructure of the ecosystem which has become worn out due to the larger-than-expected demand it saw. He therefore stated that Coinbase is planning to invest in its infrastructures to effectively tackle the challenge.