AlgoExplorer's domain no longer resolves, leaving Lora, Allo and Pera to cover Algorand

2026-08-11

explorer · api · testnet · algokit · infrastructure · discovery · chain-only · updated

AlgoExplorer's domain no longer resolves, leaving Lora, Allo and Pera to cover Algorand

The window that closed

Algorand's most-used public window on its own chain no longer resolves. The domain algoexplorer.io fails DNS lookup, and the Internet Archive holds nothing of it after May 2024; the smaller community explorer Blockpack (blockpack.app) is likewise gone, with no archive capture after March 2025. Neither is presented here as a working service. When AlgoExplorer shut down, developers, auditors and casual users lost the default way to verify a transaction, read an account balance or debug a contract — and no single replacement has taken its place. Instead, four explorers with different temperaments now share the job, running on free API infrastructure that much of the ecosystem also leans on.

The explorers of 2026

Lora, the open-source explorer maintained by the Algorand Foundation as part of its AlgoKit developer toolkit, is the official default. Allo.info, built by Nodely (formerly AlgoNode), is the analytics-oriented option. Pera Explorer comes from the team behind the Pera Wallet. AlgoGazer is a mobile-first community project launched in 2025.

Explorer	Concept	Real-World Implication
Lora	AlgoKit's open-source explorer covering LocalNet, TestNet and MainNet	One interface for inspecting blocks, transactions, assets, accounts and apps across production, test and a local sandbox, with visual transaction-group diagrams
Allo.info	Nodely's ecosystem-analytics explorer, with AlloAlerts address monitoring	Follow an address, read plain-language explanations of complex transactions, and get notified when a wallet's balance or participation keys change
Pera Explorer	Wallet-operator explorer with its own ASA verification program	Check balances and opt into ASAs from any wallet; the badge program is Pera's own curation
AlgoGazer	Mobile-first community explorer with NFD support and synced bookmarks	On-chain search from a phone; lists NFT collections in its directory for a 25 ALGO fee

Pera's position carries a conflict worth naming: the explorer is operated by the same company as the wallet, its verified/suspicious badges are its own judgment — the verification program's terms say it is not an endorsement — and its UI naturally prioritizes Pera Wallet flows, including download prompts and asset opt-ins designed for its own app. Users of other wallets are better served treating the raw on-chain parameters visible on Lora or Allo as the neutral record.

A live check of Lora on 11 August 2026 showed it rendering current mainnet state with blocks arriving roughly every three seconds and 0.001 ALGO transaction fees. The project is actively maintained, with a commit on 7 August 2026 and a v2.4.0-beta.2 release on 21 May 2026 on GitHub.

The metadata problem Lora is working on

An Algorand Standard Asset (ASA) — a token issued directly on the base layer, from a stablecoin to an NFT — records only a name, unit name, total supply, decimals and a URL on the ledger. Everything that makes a token legible to a buyer, its image, description and traits, never had a dedicated home on-chain. The ecosystem improvised through three generations of off-chain metadata, each with a distinct flaw:

Approach	Concept	Real-World Implication
ARC-3	JSON metadata file on IPFS, pointed to by the asset's URL field	Every asset-page load makes an external fetch; a dead gateway leaves the asset anonymous
ARC-19	Same IPFS pointer, re-pointable by reconfiguring the asset's Reserve address	Updates work, but metadata history is scattered across a chain of configuration transactions
ARC-69	JSON note on the asset's configuration transaction	Discoverable only through an indexer — a separate service that catalogs chain history; updating costs another transaction

Version 2.4.0-beta.1, released April 14 2026, added 'support arc-89': Lora can now read an asset's metadata from a registry that lives inside the Algorand ledger itself, instead of stitching together off-chain files. The ARC-89 specification describes the previous state plainly — the absence of a native metadata store pushed the ecosystem to adopt 'less-than-ideal solutions', including 'hacking on the ASA RBAC roles to get asset metadata mutability'. Whether the registry reaches MainNet was still to be determined at the time of the beta write-up, and the accompanying SDK's downloads are modest, at 65 per month when the release was documented.

Where the data comes from: Nodely

Much of this tooling sits on Nodely, the infrastructure provider that grew out of AlgoNode and still runs the best-known free Algorand endpoints (mainnet-api.algonode.cloud and testnet-api.algonode.cloud). Its own figures, current as of the 2026 homepage: 115M+ API requests daily across 20+ geographic locations, 75+ indexers serving those requests, 75+ customers and 5+ AVM-compatible chains supported. The free tier requires no API key, offers 60 requests per second per browser on the current homepage (the older docs page quotes 50), a front-end quota of 6M requests or 150GB per month, an IPFS gateway and a 99.95% service-level objective. Paid tiers scale up from there.

Tier	Concept	Real-World Implication
Free	0 ALGO/forever; archival node and indexer, no keys, 60 req/s per browser, IPFS gateway, 99.95% SLO	Enough for development and moderate production traffic; backend and bot traffic is subject to separate global quotas
Unlimited	$256/month; 6,000 req/s per key/site at 25 locations, 500 req/s per IP, 99.99% SLO	For production apps that outgrow per-browser limits and need headroom across many endpoints
Business	$256/month (annual); 100% SLA with reimbursement, fee abstraction, 1M transactions included	Transaction fees billed in USD, with SLA-backed support for commercial projects

A skeptical reading is warranted on two points. First, the SLO figures are Nodely's own commitments, pointed at its status pages rather than an independent audit. Second, the free tier is a quota-capped loss leader: the homepage frames it as a way to start free and migrate to self-hosting or a paid tier once a project becomes profitable, and demand that repeatedly crosses the caps is met with HTTP 429 throttling. The structural hedge against lock-in is real, though — Nodely's core service runs 'vanilla OSS node and indexer APIs', in its own phrasing, so a project can point the same client code at its own node without rewrites.

algod vs indexer: what an explorer actually queries

Explorers are frontends for two different services. Algod is the node daemon's REST API — the live source of truth for current state (latest round, account balances, asset parameters) and the endpoint through which transactions are submitted to the network. The indexer is a separate service that catalogs the chain's full history into a searchable database, which is what powers account history, asset transfer logs and activity pages. A developer can run both locally via AlgoKit LocalNet — algokit localnet start spins up a private sandbox in Docker with algod on localhost:4001 and the indexer on localhost:8980 — or rely on Nodely's hosted versions.

Test funds, now with guardrails

To develop against TestNet, you need test ALGO that costs nothing. Lora Fund, which also answers at the old bank.testnet.algorand.network address, is the current faucet, and it is deliberately less open than before. The page's own notice reads: 'To help protect this network, we impose daily fund limits. Please log in to fund your account.' Connecting a wallet ties each request to an on-chain identity rather than an anonymous IP, which blocks the cheapest scripted-abuse vectors.

The trade-off is a transparency gap. The specific cap number is not printed on the faucet page; the Algorand Foundation's own explainer video cites 10 test ALGO per day, but a developer reading the page sees only the generic notice. The limit is machine-readable, however: the AlgoKit Dispenser API (api.dispenser.algorandfoundation.tools) exposes an endpoint that returns the current daily limit, and over-limit requests come back with a fund_limit_exceeded error that includes the limit and the reset timestamp. Refunds are supported, and limits reset daily at midnight UTC. A developer who hits the cap without parsing the JSON error could reasonably conclude the faucet is broken — a documentation problem for an otherwise sensible anti-abuse design.

The AlgoKit CLI wraps the same service (algokit dispenser fund --receiver <address> --amount <microAlgos>), including a CI mode whose access token is issued for 30 days so automated test pipelines can fund addresses in builds. For developers who want no public chain at all, LocalNet is an ephemeral sandbox: it ships 30,000 pre-generated participation keys and is designed to be reset, so anything on it is disposable. FNet, a temporary devnet for testing the upcoming block-incentives protocol, can also be reset, and each new instance carries a distinct genesis hash; its live site currently errors over SSL, with its docs still readable through the Wayback Machine — a caveat for anyone relying on it today.

Verify a token yourself

A concrete walkthrough on Lora: open the page for USDC (ASA ID 31566704 on MainNet). The asset view shows the total supply, six decimals, the URL field pointing at centre.io, and — most importantly — the four administrative roles an ASA creator can assign. USDC's mainnet issuer has set a Manager and a Freeze address, a Reserve matching the creator, and no Clawback. Each role matters: a Manager can reconfigure the asset and change the other roles, a Freeze address can freeze tokens held by a specific account, and a Clawback address can take tokens back. Any of these being set is a fact about issuer control, not a verdict on the token — but it is precisely the fact a buyer should check before trusting an unfamiliar ASA. The transaction history beneath the asset parameters lists live transfers with their fees, each linking through to a full transaction view with sender, receiver, amount, timestamp and block.

That last page is the whole point of the exercise. Because Algorand finalizes each block in under three seconds with no forking, a transaction shown in a block is final — there are no probabilistic confirmations to wait for, which makes the explorer's job one of visibility rather than interpretation. The window AlgoExplorer once provided has closed; what replaces it is a smaller set of tools, a free-but-quota-capped API layer underneath, and a faucet that asks you to identify yourself before it hands out test money.

Source

Source: editorial://brief/ed94deab-bfff-4781-bc28-ef62d6815db1