Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced a temporary suspension of deposits and withdrawals for tokens on the Base network in connection with the upcoming Cobalt network upgrade and hard fork.
The upgrade is scheduled to take place around 18:00 UTC on September 30, 2026. Binance will pause deposits and withdrawals at approximately 17:00 UTC on the same day, about one hour before the hard fork.
Base is an Ethereum layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase. The Cobalt upgrade introduces improvements to the B20 token standard, adds validity transactions, implements dynamic node upgrades, and migrates Trusted Execution Environment signer registration to fully onchain attestation verification using AWS Nitro attestations with checked P-384 hints, replacing the RISC Zero and Boundless proving flow.
Binance said trading of tokens on the Base network will not be impacted during the upgrade. The exchange will handle all technical requirements for users, and deposits and withdrawals will be reopened once the upgraded network is considered stable, without a separate announcement.
Additional details show that Cobalt allows users to pay transaction fees in B20s, schedule multiplier updates, simplify blocked transfers, and introduce new Union and Intersect policies. A later upgrade named Denim, planned for October 2026, will bring native blocks at a 200ms cadence, onchain millisecond time through BaseTime, and millisecond-resolution RPC timestamps.
