Pera Connect SDK 1.6.0 ships experimental ARC-27 browser-extension signing

The Developer Front Door of Algorand's Default Wallet

When a web application on Algorand asks a visitor to connect a wallet, the wallet that typically opens is Pera's¹. Pera launched as the network's official wallet, rebranded in February 2022, and remains the default mobile choice — the iOS app carries a 4.8-star average across 7,952 ratings, and the team announced a ground-up rebuild of both apps on a single React Native codebase on August 11. Twelve days before that announcement, the same team shipped version 1.6.0 of @perawallet/connect², the JavaScript SDK that lets web applications talk to the wallet. The release's headline addition — signature requests through a browser extension, standardized as ARC-27 — is deliberately conservative: it ships behind an experimental flag that is off by default.

The SDK sits at the center of Pera's technical documentation hub³, which organizes four integration surfaces for third-party developers. Each lets a project borrow infrastructure Pera already runs for its own products instead of building it from scratch.

What 1.6.0 Actually Adds

Pera Connect runs on the WalletConnect protocol, which lets a web app connect to a wallet by scanning a QR code so the app can read the wallet's address and request signed transactions without ever holding the private keys. The SDK's core methods are small: connect() returns account addresses, signTransaction() signs single transactions or atomic groups — sets that must all commit or none do — and signData() signs arbitrary bytes for authentication and identity flows.

Version 1.6.0, released July 30, adds a second transport for signing: ARC-27, the Algorand standard that lets a browser-extension wallet answer a dApp's requests directly, skipping the QR round-trip. Because support is gated behind an experimental flag defaulting to false, nothing changes for existing integrations unless a developer opts in. Once enabled, the connect modal lists a 'Connect with Pera Extension' option, auto-detects a compatible installed extension through an ARC-27 discover round-trip, and falls back to QR or Pera Web if none is found. The extension path supports ARC-60 data signing — with the requesting domain checked against the page origin — but not the legacy arbitrary-data signing, which throws an unsupported-operation error. The same release carried a batch of ARC-60 spec-compliance fixes, and a 1.6.1-beta.0 now sits on npm's beta tag.

The package recorded 46,854 downloads in the trailing month, 11,724 of them in the last week, and 46 other registered npm packages depend on it. The GitHub repository⁴ carries 70¹ stars and was pushed as recently as August 14 with fixes for an iOS Safari signing flow and mislabeled signData errors — a maintenance cadence that matches the wallet's own: the example dApp⁵ the team maintains exercises more than a hundred signing scenarios, from single payments to 1,000²-transaction batches.

The Rest of the Hub: Data, Collectibles, Deep Links

The three other surfaces address what a dApp needs around the signing flow itself. The Public API, served from mainnet.api.perawallet.app, returns metadata for any ASA on the network — name, unit name, decimals, total supply, creator, logo, USD value — plus a verification tier of trusted, verified, unverified or suspicious, with responses cached for five minutes. Dedicated verified-assets and labeled-assets endpoints return allowlists in a single response, and the docs link a Swagger UI and downloadable OpenAPI spec. Two caveats: a deprecation notice dated 2024 moved endpoints to the /v1/public/ path with redirects from August 1 of that year, and the API's usage requirements are branding obligations — a licensee must show 'Data provided by Pera' with the Pera logo, display the Verified and Suspicious badges next to each ASA, and link to the ASA's Pera Explorer page with a visible 'View on Pera Explorer' call to action.

The NFT parser spec explains how Pera fills its collectible database: a continuously running task iterates every asset, fetching metadata and media through a dedicated IPFS gateway, classifying a JSON object as an ARC3 NFT (metadata) and an image or video as an ARC69 NFT (media). ARC69 metadata is mutable, so the pipeline re-parses it from the asset's latest configuration transaction on every pass, while ARC3 media is fetched once and cached; files over 100 MB are ignored and failed fetches are retried three times. The mobile URL schemes round out the set with perawallet:// links that open the app into a specific action — add a watch account, opt in to an asset, or pre-fill an ALGO or ASA transfer with a note — with amounts expressed in microalgos.

The Tradeoffs a Developer Inherits

What the docs do not foreground is how thoroughly these surfaces bind a project to a single vendor. The deep-link scheme only opens Pera, the connect modal is Pera-branded, and the Public API's terms require surfacing Pera's logo and badges rather than presenting the data neutrally — and those badges are Pera's own curation, not an independent record, since its terms state a badge is not an endorsement. Neither the documentation nor the release notes cite a third-party security audit of the SDK, so teams adopting it are relying on Pera's engineering and track record. That record is real — the wallet's 7.0 rebuild and the SDK's monthly release cycle show active maintenance — but it also means Pera, as the ecosystem's default wallet, has a commercial interest in every integration it powers. Two mitigations exist for teams that want distance: the README points to the wallet-agnostic use-wallet⁶ wrapper for multi-wallet support, and developer questions land in the #dev-support channel of Pera's Discord.

The experimental flag is the honest caveat: Pera is signaling direction with ARC-27 rather than promising a finished extension story, and the opt-in gate means early adopters are testing, not depending. For a team comfortable making Pera its wallet infrastructure, the SDK is the fastest path from zero to a working Connect Wallet button; for one that wants to stay neutral across Algorand's wallet field, the wrapper layers offer an escape hatch. Either way, the docs hub is now the clearest map of where the default wallet intends to take the ecosystem's developer experience.

Source (16)

• docs.perawallet.appPera Wallet Docs
• npmjs.com@perawallet/connect on npm
• github.comperawallet/connect on GitHub
• perawallet.github.ioPera Wallet Example dApp
• docs.perawallet.app
• docs.perawallet.app
• docs.perawallet.appPera Connect | Pera Wallet Docs
• docs.perawallet.appNFT Parser Specs | Pera Wallet Docs
• docs.perawallet.appMobile App URL Schemes | Pera Wallet Docs
• raw.githubusercontent.com
• raw.githubusercontent.com
• explorer.perawallet.appPera Algorand Explorer
• docs.perawallet.app
• raw.githubusercontent.com
• docs.perawallet.appIntroduction | Pera Wallet Docs
• registry.npmjs.org