A Cantor action is a minimal equicontinuous action of a countably generated group $G$ on a Cantor space $X$. Such actions are also called generalized odometers in the literature. In this work, we introduce two new conjugacy invariants for Cantor actions, the stabilizer limit group and the centralizer limit group. An action is wild if the stabilizer limit group is an increasing sequence of stabilizer groups without bound and otherwise is said to be stable if this group chain is bounded. For Cantor actions by a finitely generated group $G$, we prove that stable actions satisfy a rigidity principle and furthermore show that the wild property is an invariant of the continuous orbit equivalence class of the action. A Cantor action is said to be dynamically wild if it is wild and the centralizer limit group is a proper subgroup of the stabilizer limit group. This property is also a conjugacy invariant and we show that a Cantor action with a non-Hausdorff element must be dynamically wild. We then give examples of wild Cantor actions with non-Hausdorff elements, using recursive methods from geometric group theory to define actions on the boundaries of trees.

In the first part of the paper, we introduce notions of asymptotic continuous orbit equivalence and asymptotic conjugacy in Smale spaces and characterize them in terms of their asymptotic Ruelle algebras with their dual actions. In the second part, we introduce a groupoid $C^{\ast }$-algebra that is an extended version of the asymptotic Ruelle algebra from a Smale space and study the extended Ruelle algebras from the view points of Cuntz–Krieger algebras. As a result, the asymptotic Ruelle algebra is realized as a fixed point algebra of the extended Ruelle algebra under certain circle action.