Ethereum

Holding ETH pays nothing; the protocol only rewards validators for securing the network, and those rewards float and can be lost.

Riba means interest, a guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ETH in a wallet earns nothing from the protocol. New ETH is paid only to validators, who lock their own ETH and do consensus work: proposing blocks, voting on (attesting to) blocks and taking part in sync committees. This reward is not a contracted rate: it falls as more ETH is staked, missed duties are penalised, and misbehaving validators are slashed, meaning part of their stake is burned. Validators also keep users' tips (priority fees) as payment for including transactions, while the base fee is burned.

Ethereum is a working computation network that people pay ETH to use; Islamic Finance Guru rates it permissible.

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. Ethereum clearly works: it has run since July 2015, and every transaction or smart-contract call pays a fee (gas) in ETH. Islamic Finance Guru, the first-priority authoritative source, rates Ethereum permissible on the same reasoning as Bitcoin, as a digital asset; Malaysia's Securities Commission Shariah Advisory Council (2020) also classes such digital currency as goods ('urudh) tradable on registered exchanges.

Ethereum is not a gambling product, but trading of ETH itself is dominated by derivatives.

Maysir is gambling: gaining or losing by chance rather than by productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and ETH has no lottery-like mechanics. The market around it is heavily speculative, though: on 16 September 2026 CoinGlass showed about $52.5 billion of ETH futures volume in 24 hours against about $3.6 billion of spot volume on the venues it tracks, and CoinDesk Data found that derivatives made up 76.5% of all centralised-exchange crypto volume in March 2026.

No company issues ETH or earns from it; fees are burned or paid to validators for their work.

The revenue thresholds (below 5% from clearly impermissible sources, below 20% from disputed ones) apply to an issuer's or protocol's economics. Ethereum has no issuer: new ETH is created only as validator rewards, and the Ethereum Foundation describes itself as a steward, not the network's ruler. Under EIP-1559 the base fee of every transaction is burned and only the tip goes to the block producer, so there is no protocol treasury and no interest income; impermissible protocol revenue is effectively 0%.

Supply, code and the upgrade process are public and verifiable, though staking and client software are concentrated in a few hands.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty about what is being bought. ETH has no hard cap, but issuance follows a public formula and total supply (about 122.05 million ETH on 16 September 2026) can be checked onchain. The code is open source, upgrades go through public Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and there are no token unlocks. Concentration is the main uncertainty: Lido's pool held about 22.4% of staked ETH on 16 September 2026; at 30 June 2026 Coinbase held about 10.9% and Binance about 7.9%, and the treasury company Bitmine reports about 5.07 million staked ETH.

Ethereum is mainly used for stablecoin settlement and computation; interest-based lending is a notable minority of its DeFi.

Ethereum is general-purpose infrastructure: every action pays for computation in ETH, and it hosts the largest stablecoin supply of any chain, about $146 billion on DefiLlama data, plus about $19.8 billion of tokenised real-world assets. A notable share of the value locked in its applications, however, sits in interest-based lending: by DefiLlama data (own aggregation, 16 September 2026), lending and CDP protocols held about $37.1 billion, roughly 24% of Ethereum protocol TVL (total value locked), and Aave V3 ($14.1 billion) was the largest Ethereum DeFi project.

ETH can be bought fully paid on spot markets and held in self-custody or through funds that hold ETH.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. ETH trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on many exchanges, and holders can keep their own keys. It is on the National Bank of Kazakhstan's list of authorised unsecured digital assets, and US spot funds hold ETH directly: BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust reported $8.69 billion of net assets on 15 September 2026. Leveraged and derivative forms exist too, but they are optional, not the only way to own ETH. Permissible ownership is fully available, so the score is the maximum.

Ethereum provides large-scale settlement at low energy cost; abuse such as hacks and laundering exists but does not dominate.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. Since The Merge in 2022, Ethereum's electricity use has fallen by more than 99.988%, to about 0.0026 TWh a year by CCRI estimates. It settles the largest stablecoin supply of any chain and $19.8 billion of tokenised real-world assets (RWA.xyz, 16 September 2026). Harm exists: the FBI attributed the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in February 2025 to North Korea, and mixers such as Tornado Cash have been used for laundering, although the US Treasury lifted its Tornado Cash sanctions in March 2025.