Base Traffic Surge Crams Out Robinhood Chain from Ethereum Blob Space

A surge in transactions on Base filled Ethereum's blob space and temporarily crowded out Robinhood Chain, leaving it unable to post its transaction batches to Ethereum for 14 minutes.

According to Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain experienced batch posting delays due to L1 market blob behavior, but the network itself remained operational. The incident occurred when Base nearly tripled its usage of Ethereum's blob space, from 222 blobs to 593, and posted batches six times as often.

The congestion was in capacity rather than price, with Ethereum blocks carrying an average of 6.92 blobs before filling up at the 21-blob ceiling. The blob base fee climbed 27-fold inside half an hour, reaching 0.1473 gwei by 12:53:23 UTC.

Robinhood Chain's batch poster, which normally submits batches every 12 seconds, went silent for 8 minutes and 36 seconds and another 5 minutes and 24 seconds during the incident, affecting users' ability to reconstruct the chain and check its validity. The incident has raised concerns about the reliance on Ethereum's blob space and the potential for congestion in the future.