Base has pushed its Beryl mainnet upgrade back one day to make sure the new B20 Activation Registry is fully online before the hard fork goes live.
New timing and reason
- Beryl will now activate on mainnet on June 26 at 18:00 UTC (moved from the original June 25 date), Base said via its docs.
- The short delay is due to a timing dependency: the B20 Activation Registry must finish initializing before developers can deploy native B20 tokens. Base warns the registry can take up to an hour to come online after activation, so the extra day gives the team enough buffer to avoid launching the hard fork before those feature flags are available.
What Beryl brings
- B20 token standard: a protocol-level token standard that lets issuers create stablecoins and real-world-asset tokens directly in Base’s node software instead of deploying ERC-20 smart contracts. Base says B20 is compatible with ERC-20 and supports ERC-2612 permit functionality, meaning existing wallets, exchanges and indexers should work without changes.
- Issuer Toolkit: role-based permissions, mint/burn controls, transfer restrictions, optional supply caps, and freeze/seizure features aimed at regulated issuers.
- Faster withdrawals: the standard withdrawal route from Base to Ethereum used by most bridges will drop from seven days to five days, thanks to Azul’s Multiproofs improvements that lowered dependence on the original fault-proof challenge window.
- Node efficiency: integration of Reth V2, which Base says can cut node storage needs by up to 50% while supporting higher block gas targets.
Context and recent network incident
- Beryl is Base’s second independent upgrade after Azul (May). The network originally scheduled Beryl for June 25 — the same day a nearly two-hour block production outage occurred after an invalid block entered the sequencing pipeline. Engineers restored normal production later that day and said the outage was unrelated to the planned Beryl upgrade.
- Base confirmed blocks are being produced normally; any stuck nodes should recover after restart and sync. The team says it has identified the root cause of the halt and will publish a full post-mortem. Founder Jesse Pollak reassured users that funds remained safe and acknowledged that network halts are unacceptable for infrastructure intended to serve global financial activity.
Looking ahead
- Base has already scheduled its next upgrade, Cobalt, for September. The team expects Cobalt to introduce native account abstraction (protocol-level smart accounts), gas sponsorship, transaction batching, expanded B20 capabilities, and a unified node binary that merges consensus and execution clients.
Bottom line: the one-day postponement aims to ensure B20-related infrastructure is fully ready at launch, reducing the risk of post-fork issues while bringing a suite of features — native token issuance, faster withdrawals, and node optimizations — that could materially change how issuers and operators use Base.
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