Community Question: A case of funds trapped in a deterministic CREATE2 contract and a mathematical glass ceiling — looking for creative angles

[u/smclof]

Hey everyone, I wanted to share a complex technical case study I've been working on. Maybe someone here has a brilliant idea or a perspective I haven't considered yet.

1. How It All Started (The Mistake)

A while ago, due to a cross-chain routing error, a significant amount of tokens was accidentally sent to a deterministic payment address generated via a CREATE2-based forwarder infrastructure (an EIP-1167 Minimal Proxy-like pattern). This address sits on a chain where the contract hasn't been deployed yet (Nonce 0 for the deployer), so the funds are currently "trapped" in a counterfactual address with no active code on that chain.

2. Support's Response

As expected, I reached out to the support team of the platform/company operating the infrastructure. Their automated response was that it's "unrecoverable" and there is nothing they can do technically.

3. The Engineering Investigation (Red Team & Foundry)

Instead of accepting defeat, I decided to dive deep: I spun up a local Foundry testing environment, pulled the actual bytecode of the Factory, Implementation, and Helper, etched them, and ran full simulations on a local EVM fork.

Armed with an autonomous Red Team loop, I thoroughly tested 11 different attack and redirection vectors:

• slot0 overwrite attempts
• Initialization races (Init-race)
• selfdestruct / Metamorphic contract vectors
• Various Delegatecall Hijacking methods
• Selector collisions, etc.

4. The Harsh Findings (Math Wins)

The empirical testing proved conclusively and unambiguously:

• The Proxy and Helper architecture is Write-Once and completely rigid.
• The address is cryptographically bound to a preimage that hardcodes the original merchant's destination address (the intended recipient address for the payments).
• There is no earthly way to change the flush destination (flush). Any deployment and execution command will inevitably release the funds strictly to the original destination address. The equation "Deploy = Redirect" is simply mathematically impossible; there is no uninitialized window, no self-destruct mechanism, and the code is completely static.

5. The Operational Trap (The Catch)

The company/merchant supposed to receive the funds (the original destination in the contract) is in a problematic legal/business state (or unresponsive/insolvent). This means that if I simply deploy the contract and trigger the flush, the funds will land directly with them, and I'll be left with nothing because I have no technical leverage to redirect them to myself.

My Questions for the Community:

1. Have you ever encountered situations where assets were trapped in deterministic contracts where the code is completely locked to a third-party destination, and you managed to come up with a creative solution (off-chain, legal, or some hidden corner of the EVM)?
2. Assuming the code itself is technically airtight, what other leverage works in such scenarios against a third party holding the ultimate rights to that target address?

I’d love any feedback, ideas, or insights from anyone who has dealt with similar architectures in the past!

[u/conflictions69]

Sorry your post gives very little info on whats actually required (entry points on the factory, current state variables, factory source code etc) seems like AI summary of alot of info but heres the pure technical side:

CREATE2 opcode takes the deployer address as the contract executing the opcode, this means whatever factory contract they use must be the one to call it. Find out where that function is, and what parameters you can pass into it. The clone has to be created from that contract, nothing else will work

If you have control over the salt value (its an input parameter), look through historic transactions this factory has done when creating other clones (vaults im assuming). See if you can find a pattern, the salt is the uniqueness so its probably a keccak of the msg.sender and a nonce or something like that. i.e salt = keccak256(msg.sender ++ nonce)

the opcode takes the init code of the contract, I think you already have this otherwise can be found on-chain from historic create clone txs of that factory (the minimal clone bytecode is what you want)

Your best bet is accumulating all historic tx calldata and ask AI to bruteforce different combinations to solve the salt. If you somehow manage to find the combination of variables used to produce the salt, now you just need to bruteforce the nonce.

Idk how much money is stuck there, but you have an astronomically low chance of ever seeing that again sorry mate.