Base will not let issuers create tokens under its new B20 standard until 6pm UTC on June 26, after confirming that the internal switch controlling the feature can take up to an hour to come online once the Beryl hard fork activates.
B20 is the centerpiece of Beryl and the reason the upgrade matters to stablecoin and real-world-asset issuers, since it lets them mint compliant tokens directly on Base rather than writing and auditing their own smart contracts. That feature arrives a beat behind the fork itself, and any attempt to deploy a token before the switch flips simply fails, so Base tells developers to confirm the standard reads as live before submitting anything. The network had originally targeted June 25 for Beryl.
The delay lands a day after Base spent roughly two hours recovering from an unrelated mainnet stall. Block production turned unhealthy at 16:03 UTC on June 25, when a consensus fault produced an invalid block and stopped the chain from advancing past block 47,806,542, interrupting deposits, withdrawals and swaps until the sequencer resumed at 17:51 UTC and Base verified full recovery by 19:22 UTC. Base said the halt stayed separate from Beryl and that user funds remained secure throughout.
Why The Wait Matters For Issuers
B20 ships in two forms, an asset variant for general tokens and tokenized real-world assets and a stablecoin variant for fiat-pegged coins, and Base built both for the institutions it has spent the past year recruiting.
The standard bakes controls such as minting limits, transfer restrictions and freeze powers into the chain itself, which is the pitch Base has carried to regulated issuers deciding where to launch. That ambition runs through its dealmaking, including a seven-figure investment in tokenization platform Centrifuge to bring tokenized funds and credit products onto the network.
Stablecoins Anchor The Bigger Bet
The stablecoin variant carries the most weight because dollar-pegged tokens already drive much of Base’s activity. Base’s total value locked—the capital committed across the chain’s protocols—fell about $245 million over the prior 24 hours against that backdrop, according to DeFiLlama, even as stablecoin supply on the network held near $4.01 billion after adding $19.6 million across the week.
Coinbase has wired consumer rails into the network that let businesses settle USDC payments, and recent partnerships widen that base, with Amazon Web Services joining Coinbase and Stripe to route USDC micropayments for AI agents across Base and Solana, and Coinbase and Cardless rolling out a stablecoin-backed credit card that settles in USDC on Base. B20 lets the next set of issuers mint those tokens without deploying their own contracts, a capability that goes live June 26.
