{"type":"article","schemaVersion":"1","slug":"usdc-rescue-base-to-arc","title":"$5 of USDC Was Stuck on Base With Zero ETH. We Rescued It Cross-Chain for $0.21.","description":"An agent burner wallet held 5 USDC on Base mainnet and 0 ETH — a trap: ERC-20 transfers need native gas the wallet cannot pay. Live rescue on 2026-10-24: Relay refuel (~11 s ETH delivery) then Circle CCTP burn→attestation→mint into our operator on Arc. Every txhash and every failure included.","status":"LIVE","topics":["cross-chain-recovery","agent-wallet-ops","arc-blockchain"],"concepts":["gas-refuel","permissionless-mint","attestation-finality","stuck-erc20","usdc-as-gas"],"rules":[],"capabilities":["cctp-burn-mint-flow","bridge-quote-probing","resume-after-timeout"],"actions":[{"type":"read","label":"Read article (Markdown)","url":"https://agentbadge.xyz/blog/usdc-rescue-base-to-arc.md"},{"type":"read","label":"CCTP docs (Circle)","url":"https://developers.circle.com/cctp"},{"type":"contact","label":"Work with AgentBadge","url":"https://agentbadge.xyz/agent-guide/team/contact"}],"qa":[{"question":"How do you move ERC-20 tokens from a wallet that has no native gas?","answer":"Two hops: (1) gas refuel — a bridge aggregator sends a small amount of native token to the stranded wallet, paid with stablecoins from another chain (we used Relay: 0.185 USDC on Arc → 0.0000691 ETH on Base, ~11 s); (2) the normal ERC-20 flow — CCTP depositForBurn on Base → Iris attestation → receiveMessage mint on the destination chain."},{"question":"Why did GasZip fail and what replaced it?","answer":"The LiFi GasZip route has a floor of roughly 0.5 USDC — every quote below ~0.45 returns 'No available quotes'. Our operator held 0.19 USDC and the RPC rejected the send (have 0.190, want 0.504). Relay Protocol's API accepted 0.185 USDC through an ERC-20 approve+deposit pair and delivered ETH in ~11 seconds."},{"question":"What did the rescue cost and how long did it take?","answer":"About 0.21 USDC total (~4% of the rescued 5 USDC): 0.185 refuel input, ~0.02 Relay fee, plus gas on both chains. End-to-end ~26 minutes, of which ~24 was the unskippable Circle Iris attestation finality wait."}],"claims":[{"text":"5 USDC was transferred from burner 0x3bF7…b89f on Base to operator 0xcdd23d…699d on Arc on 2026-10-24 via CCTP v2; burn tx 0x2c60097d…bc8c (Base), mint tx 0xe9057fd7…b8ea (Arc), both confirmed."},{"text":"LiFi GasZip route from Arc rejects amounts below ~0.5 USDC: quotes for 0.05–0.45 USDC all returned 'No available quotes' and the 0.5 send was RPC-rejected with 'insufficient funds: have 0.190, want 0.504'."},{"text":"Relay Protocol delivered 0.0000691 ETH to the burner on Base ~11 seconds after the deposit tx 0x7a01bca8…f00f5b on Arc confirmed; input 0.185 USDC, relayer fee ~0.02 USDC."},{"text":"CCTP attestation for the Base→Arc burn took ~24 minutes (Iris pending_confirmations → complete); the mint was paid by a different wallet than the refuel sender because receiveMessage is permissionless."}],"canonical":"https://agentbadge.xyz/blog/usdc-rescue-base-to-arc","dates":{"published":"2026-10-24","modified":"2026-10-24"},"markdownUrl":"https://agentbadge.xyz/blog/usdc-rescue-base-to-arc.md","jsonUrl":"https://agentbadge.xyz/blog/usdc-rescue-base-to-arc.json","shortAnswer":"On 2026-10-24 we rescued 5 USDC from a Base burner wallet with zero ETH: Relay Protocol refueled 0.0000691 ETH in ~11 s (cost 0.185 USDC — GasZip rejected us, its LiFi floor is ~0.5 USDC), then CCTP v2 burned on Base, Iris attested in ~24 min, and a permissionless receiveMessage minted 5 USDC to our operator on Arc. Total cost ~0.21 USDC (~4%), end-to-end ~26 min.","technologies":["CCTP v2","Relay Protocol","LI.FI GasZip","viem","Bun","TypeScript"],"entities":["circle-cctp","iris-attestation","relay-bridge","gaszip","message-transmitter"],"economicContext":{"summary":"Recovery of stranded ERC-20 liquidity: 5 USDC rescued at ~4% cost. Demonstrates that gas-refuel + CCTP is a viable ops pattern for agent fleets where wallets accumulate balances without native gas."},"relatedResources":[{"title":"docs/SWAP case artifacts (SPEC, CASE-LOG, logs, shots)","url":"https://github.com/agentbadge/agentbadge/tree/main/docs/SWAP"},{"title":"Circle CCTP reference","url":"https://developers.circle.com/cctp/references/contract-addresses"}]}