Unavailable index or empty balance

Your assets did not disappear

A zero on a screen is a statement about a service, not about the chain. Before concluding anything is missing, find out which of the states below you are actually in.

The states, and what each means

State	What it means	What to do
Ready, result empty	The service answered, and there is nothing there	Check the address and asset type
Unavailable	The service cannot answer at all	Wait and retry. Nothing is lost
Degraded	Answering, but not from a complete view	Do not act on the answer
Stale	Answering from an old chain position	Check the indexed height
Mixed tip	The generation spans more than one provider tip	Do not act on the answer
Not covered	This asset type is not in this projection	Use the right service
Configured but not ready	Set up, not yet able to answer	Wait for readiness

How to tell them apart

Every Universe read service exposes readiness separately from liveness:

• GET /live says the process is running.
• GET /ready says whether it can answer correctly, and why not when it cannot.
• GET /health gives the state, which can be unavailable.
• GET /version gives the service and provider revisions.

Read /ready before concluding anything from an empty result. It reports the generation identifier, the indexed height, whether the view is stale, and whether the tip is mixed.

While an index is recovering

A restored database still needs integrity checks, a successful application start, and synchronization before its answers can be treated as current. Download completion and a running process are separate from readiness.

If a service is restoring or catching up, show that state and its indexed height. Do not show an unavailable response as an empty balance, treat an older height as the chain tip, or substitute an external blockchain provider. Recovery reuses the existing Universe-operated indexer and its protected runtime; it does not change asset ownership or protocol rules.

Wait for the service’s readiness and freshness checks before using recovered results for a transaction or market decision. A recovery in progress is not a statement that an asset is missing.

Projection coverage

An empty answer can simply mean the asset type is out of scope. The Universe NFT and Realm read model projects plain NFTs, Realms, and Subrealms, and excludes fungible tokens, Containers, and DMINT items by declaration.

Asking it about a Container returns nothing, correctly.

For product builders

The Core ARC-20 repair candidate prepared on 9 October 2026 separates balance summary, current output inventory and seller-book reads. A missing UTXO count stays unknown. A readable summary cannot authorize listing while inventory is unavailable; retained rows are display evidence until fresh checks succeed. The candidate offers independent lot and seller-book retries. Read retry does not sign again and is separate from resolving an earlier mutation’s unknown outcome under its original request key.

Component coverage is not a current mainnet readiness receipt. Funded wallet flows, consumer source qualification, private Signet challenge, rules, interpreter and isolated database attestation and publisher gates remain outstanding. Do not use another network or a public data provider as an outage workaround. The existing verified dates and recovery history remain unchanged.

Never render an unavailable service as a zero balance. Render the state:

• “We cannot reach the index right now” for unavailable.
• “Showing data from block N” for stale.
• “This view does not cover that asset type” for out of scope.
• “No assets found” only when the service is ready and the result is genuinely empty.

Source

Readiness and freshness and indexer dependency.