What ASA Sentinel establishes

ASA Sentinel answers one question about an Algorand Standard Asset: what can the issuer still do to the people holding it, and which of those powers has it permanently given up? It does not evaluate price, liquidity, team reputation or intent.

What gets checked

Issuer capabilities

Whether the asset's configuration can still be changed, whether holdings can be frozen, whether holdings can be taken, what the reserve address designates, and the fact that total supply is fixed at creation.

Durability of each capability

Whether a power is active, or was cleared and therefore renounced irreversibly. A cleared manager address locks the whole configuration permanently.

Configuration history

Every asset-config transaction back to the asset's creation, scored by the control role it actually changed. Changes performed by a smart contract, as inner transactions of an application call, are included.

Rekey status

Whether any control address has handed its signing authority to another account, checked for each control address rather than only for the creator.

Why a cleared address is permanent

This is the protocol rule the whole report is built on. Algorand's asset documentation states that setting any of the four control addresses to an empty value permanently removes that capability, and that a cleared address can never be reset for the life of the asset. Because the manager is the only role that can change any role address, clearing the manager freezes the entire configuration permanently.

Total supply and decimals are fixed at creation and are not among the fields a reconfiguration can touch. An ASA manager cannot mint additional units — a materially different position from a typical ERC-20 owner, and one that people arriving from other chains routinely get wrong.

Primary source: Algorand Standard Assets — Algorand Developer Portal.

Capability states

ActiveThe capability exists right now and can be exercised. The report names the address that holds it and states the concrete effect on a holder.

Permanently renouncedThe address was cleared. Algorand provides no mechanism to reinstate a cleared control address for the life of an asset, so the power is gone for good.

Locked foreverThe manager address is cleared, so no control role of the asset can ever be changed again. Whatever the configuration is now is what it will always be.

Fixed at creationSet once when the asset was created and immutable by protocol rule. This is how total supply and decimals work: an ASA manager cannot mint additional units.

Not determinableCoverage was insufficient to establish the answer, so the report draws no conclusion either way.

Asset destroyedThe asset no longer exists, so nobody can act on holders of it. This stays distinct from a renunciation, which would imply the issuer chose to give the power up.

How every claim is labelled

Each finding and capability statement carries one of four evidence tiers, so a reader can tell an on-chain fact from a deterministic inference, a curated association, or a gap in the data.

Verified on-chain factRead directly from a named indexer response at a named round. Anyone can re-fetch the same endpoint and get the same answer. Example: the address currently holding the clawback role.

DerivedComputed from verified on-chain facts by a published, versioned rule, with the derivation stated. Example: a cleared clawback address can never be reinstated, so the capability is permanently gone.

Known associationA match in the curated known-address registry. It means only that an address is associated with a named party, and carries no endorsement or guarantee of how that party will use the rights it holds.

Unknown / incompleteWe looked and could not establish it, or the scan did not reach far enough to say. The gap is reported as its own outcome.

History coverage

Configuration history is scanned backwards from the current round towards the asset's creation transaction. Reaching creation is what makes the record complete, because the creation transaction is the anchor every later change is compared against.

The scan has a documented safety budget so that one pathological asset cannot consume a whole report. When the budget is reached before creation, the report says so explicitly: the changes listed are the most recent ones, not necessarily all of them, and the report cannot state when a cleared role was cleared. A bounded or incomplete scan is never described as complete.

An incomplete scan does not weaken the permanence statements. Those rest on the asset's configuration at the checked round combined with the protocol rule above, not on history. What history adds is the round and transaction at which a power was given up.

Asset lifecycle

A destroyed asset still returns its last-known parameters from the indexer, including its former manager, freeze and clawback addresses. ASA Sentinel identifies a destroyed asset explicitly and does not present those addresses as live powers: an asset can only be destroyed once its creator holds every unit, so no third-party holdings remain to freeze or take.

Freshness and caching

Every report states when its evidence was gathered and the Algorand round it was read at. A recent build for the same asset may be reused rather than re-scanned; when that happens the report says so, and the timestamp and round shown remain those of the original scan rather than the moment of delivery. A stored report is never altered after the fact.

Known-address registry, and how to dispute an entry

The registry maps a small number of curated addresses to the issuer they are associated with. Every entry records its source and the date it was last checked. A match is an association and nothing more — it is not an endorsement, and a recognized issuer can still act adversarially with rights it legitimately holds.

If you believe a label is wrong, out of date, or attached to an address that is not yours, write to asasentinel@protonmail.com with the address and what you believe the correct position is. We aim to respond within 14 days. Disputed entries are marked as such and stop counting as a recognized association while under review.

Ruleset changelog

Every report embeds the ruleset version that produced it. A version string is only useful if the rules behind it can be looked up, so each version's behaviour is recorded here and in the changelog kept with the source.

2026-07-25.2Current. Corrects the configuration-control statement, which named all four control roles as reassignable by the manager regardless of which had been cleared. On a live USDC report that contradicted the report's own finding two lines above: clawback was correctly reported as permanently renounced, and simultaneously described as something the manager could reassign at any time. The statement now enumerates only the roles that are still configurable, and says explicitly which cleared roles cannot be restored. No change to any state, tier, severity or address.

2026-07-25.1Capability and durability summary becomes the primary output; evidence tiers added to every claim; configuration history scanned to creation rather than over a 90-day window; asset-config transactions inside application calls extracted rather than discarded; destroyed assets identified explicitly; cache reuse disclosed. The aggregate risk level is demoted to a legacy compatibility field.

2026-07-24.1First tagged ruleset. Control-rights findings, configuration changes scored by the role they altered, rekey detection per control address, and explicit informational findings for a registry outage, an unresolvable account and a truncated scan. Configuration history covered a rolling ~90-day window.

Control facts only

ASA Sentinel examines control capabilities and observable chain behaviour. It never recommends buying, selling or holding an asset, and it does not determine whether an asset is safe, legitimate, or a scam.

How long a power lasts

Listing four addresses answers a weaker question than the one a reader has. On Algorand, clearing a control address is irreversible, so the report states which powers can still change hands and which the issuer has permanently given up.

Versioned rules, checkable evidence

Every report names the ruleset that produced it and links to that version's entry in the changelog. Each finding carries the address, transaction or round it rests on, and every one of those links out to a public block explorer.

How far the scan got

Configuration history is scanned backwards towards the asset's creation, and the report says whether it got there. A scan that stopped early is reported as a scan that stopped early.