Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2 network Base deployed its second upgrade, Beryl, to the Base Sepolia testnet on Thursday, with mainnet activation scheduled for June 25.

Beryl introduces B20, a native token standard for issuing stablecoins and other assets directly within Base's node software, and cuts the chain's standard withdrawal delay to Ethereum from seven days to five, according to a blog post from Base's engineering team.

A native token standard

B20 implements the full ERC-20 specification and includes ERC-2612 permits, which let holders approve spenders with a signature instead of a separate transaction, making the standard a drop-in replacement for existing wallets, exchanges, and indexers built for ERC-20 tokens.

What's different, however, is execution.

Rather than running as a conventional smart contract, a B20 token is a precompiled contract, which means its logic is written in Rust and runs directly inside the node software instead of as onchain EVM bytecode, Base said.

The standard ships with an Issuer Toolkit covering role-based access control, mint, and burn functions with optional supply caps, granular transfer policies, and a freeze-and-seize mechanism built for regulated issuers.

Two variants are available at launch, including a general-purpose asset version and a stablecoin version with fixed six-decimal precision and an issuer-defined currency code.

Base said the toolkit is built on code audited by the company and Spearbit, with future updates planned to let issuers pay gas fees in their own B20 tokens instead of ETH.

Faster withdrawals

Beryl also shortens the standard delay for withdrawing assets from Base to Ethereum, cutting the wait from seven days to five for the path most bridging providers use, the company wrote.

The change builds on Multiproofs, a system Base introduced with Azul, its first independent upgrade, which activated on mainnet in May.

Multiproofs already created a faster, one-day finalization path for withdrawals when both a TEE and a zero-knowledge proof agree a transaction is legitimate, but that path sees little use in practice because generating the ZK proof is costly, Base said.

Beryl instead targets the slower, more commonly used single-proof path. The seven-day window dates to Base's earlier fault-proof system, which built in long delays so challengers could dispute a withdrawal.

Multiproofs narrowed the purpose of that delay to detecting and disabling a faulty prover, which Base said is what allows the window to keep shrinking.

Scaling under the hood

The upgrade also ships Reth V2, the latest version of the Rust-based execution client that has been Base's sole client since Azul.

The update reduces disk usage across the chain's full, minimal, and archive nodes and lets Base raise block gas targets without overloading its sequencer or RPC nodes, expanding available blockspace for builders.

A faster upgrade cadence

Beryl arrives roughly four weeks after Azul's mainnet activation, a pace Base credited to its February move away from a shared dependency on Optimism's OP Stack toward its own unified technology stack.

Base's next upgrade, Cobalt, is targeted for September and is expected to introduce native account abstraction, making smart accounts a protocol-level feature with built-in gas sponsorship and transaction batching, alongside additional B20 features and a unified node binary combining the chain's consensus and execution clients.