Base delays Beryl hard fork over B20 registry timing issue

Ethereum Layer 2 network Base has pushed its Beryl mainnet upgrade to June 26 at 18:00 UTC, one day later than originally scheduled, to ensure the hard fork's underlying B20 Activation Registry is fully operational before it activates.

The delay centers on a timing dependency baked into Beryl's architecture, according to the team behind the Coinbase-incubated scaling network.

Developers cannot deploy tokens on Base's new native B20 standard until the Activation Registry — which controls whether B20's feature flags are live — comes fully online, a process that can take up to one hour after the hard fork itself activates.

Beryl was originally scheduled to go live on June 25. Separately, Base's mainnet suffered a roughly two-hour block production outage that day after a consensus failure caused an invalid block to enter the sequencing pipeline. The team said the incident was unrelated to the planned Beryl upgrade.

Beryl is Base's second independent network upgrade, following Azul, which activated on mainnet in May.

Beyond the B20 token standard, the hard fork reduces the standard single-proof withdrawal delay from Base to Ethereum from 7 days to 5 and integrates Reth V2, which Base says reduces node storage overhead by up to 50%.

B20 is a protocol-level token standard for stablecoin and real-world asset issuers. Unlike traditional ERC-20 tokens, B20 tokens run as Rust precompiles inside Base's node software rather than as deployed smart contracts, and ship with a built-in compliance toolkit — including role-based access, transfer policies, and freeze-and-seize controls.

Base's next upgrade, Cobalt, is targeted for September and is expected to add native account abstraction and additional B20 features.