A 22-byte self-destructing stub sweeps USDC from a deposit address that has no key

Two properties of Arc have to hold at once for this to work. USDC is the native balance there, so a value transfer to an address with no code settles the way ether does on Ethereum ^[1]. Arc's system emitter at 0xffff...fffE then writes that movement as a Transfer event, and an empty EXTCODESIZE does not block the send ^[6]. Everywhere else USDC is an ERC-20. SELFDESTRUCT cannot move an ERC-20 balance, and a native send to a codeless address leaves no log, so the pattern is either impossible or blind on other EVM chains, according to the dev.to write-up ^[12].

The collection path is short. sweep(salt) recomputes the expected address, CREATE2-deploys the init code, and reverts with Create2Mismatch if the deployed address is not the predicted one ^[8]. That init code is hex 73, the 20-byte treasury address, hex ff ^[3]: one byte of PUSH20, twenty bytes of address, one byte of SELFDESTRUCT, 22 bytes total ^[4]. Because the constructor is the SELFDESTRUCT, the balance reaches the treasury inside the deploy transaction, and EIP-6780 deletes the account again since it was created in that same transaction ^[7]. The address comes out empty and reusable ^[9].

The write-up benchmarks a balance-moving sweep at 64,162 gas, p50 over 25 bench rows against the production factory, about $0.0013 at Arc's 20 Gwei floor ^[10]. The multiplication is straightforward: 64,162 gas at 20 Gwei is 0.00128 USDC, and no conversion step is involved because the gas asset is the stablecoin ^[11]. For the dollar reading to transfer, the 20 Gwei floor has to hold and USDC has to sit at par; the sample is 25 runs against one factory, so it is the median of one configuration.

There is no database. PAID means the system emitter has a Transfer with to == pigeonhole, SWEPT means there is also a Transfer from it that took the balance to zero, and the invoice is its URL ^[13]. Every page load is therefore an eth_getLogs query, and the query has a ceiling.

The first version asked for the whole history in one call and passed every test, because the factory was hours old at the time ^[14]. Nothing in a test suite ages. A pre-submission check measured the public RPC on 2026-09-17: a span of 9,999 blocks was accepted, 10,000 was rejected with -32012 "requested range too large" ^[15]. Arc produces roughly two blocks a second, which puts 9,999 blocks at about 5,000 seconds of chain ^[17], near the 85 minutes the write-up cites ^[16]. Past that point a refresh for an older invoice throws, and the page keeps showing UNPAID for an invoice that was paid ^[18].

The repair is three changes: chunk every scan, poll incrementally, and carry the invoice's creation block in its URL as ?from= ^[19]. With ?from= set, the span of each query depends on how old the invoice is, not on how old the factory is. The code is MIT-licensed, and the write-up links a live page and a 2:30 recording of a full cycle on Arc mainnet ^[20].