Internet Computer

Holding ICP pays nothing, but NNS staking rewards are paid for locking ICP and voting, and grow with the length of the lock-up, so their nature is disputed.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ICP earns nothing. The only native return is staking in a Network Nervous System (NNS) neuron: the holder locks ICP for up to 2 years and votes on governance proposals, directly or by following another neuron, and the protocol mints new ICP as voting rewards. The ICP is not lent to anyone and the reward is variable, set as a share of total supply and split by voting power. Islamic Finance Guru (IFG) rates ICP permissible, and ShariaQuant rates NNS staking halal.

ICP is a working utility token that pays for on-chain computing, but official religious bodies disagree on whether cryptocurrency is property (mal).

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. ICP has a clear function: it is converted into cycles that pay for computing and storage on a network that had 67 subnets and about 1.16 million running canisters on 27 September 2026, and it is needed to take part in network governance. Islamic Finance Guru (IFG), the first authoritative source in Liberandum's list, rates ICP permissible, and Sharlife and CryptoUmmah agree.

ICP is not a gambling token, but its trading is led by futures and its price history is extremely speculative.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, ICP has no chance-based payout, and it is burned to pay for computing, so the asset is not built for gambling. The score is lowered within the pass band because trading around ICP is dominated by derivatives: on 27 September 2026 Binance showed about $50 million of 24-hour ICP perpetual futures volume against about $13 million of spot volume, almost four times as much (a single-day snapshot).

Users pay for computing by burning ICP, a service fee, but the DFINITY Foundation, which leads development, publishes no financial statements, so the 5% limit cannot be checked.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns, and whether any of that income is impermissible. The Internet Computer has no company that collects revenue on behalf of ICP holders. Users pay for computing, storage and bandwidth in cycles; the ICP converted into cycles is burned, and ICP transaction fees are burned too. These are service fees for a real computing service, and DFINITY's planned cloud engines would also earn from computing.

Code and governance are public, but issuance is set by NNS votes, much unminted maturity is pending, and the 2021 token distribution was opaque.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Much is transparent: the protocol code is open source, supply and staking figures are published through public APIs, and every rule change goes through an on-chain NNS vote. The score is lowered for concrete uncertainty about the supply path: ICP has no cap, supply grew from 469.2 million at launch to about 556.9 million by 27 September 2026, neurons held about 96 million ICP-equivalent of unminted maturity (about 17% of supply), and the Mission 70 changes to rewards passed by a very narrow margin and are being rolled out step

ICP is used mainly as fuel for on-chain computing and storage and for network governance.

This criterion looks at what the asset is actually used for. ICP is converted into cycles that pay for running canister smart contracts: about 1.16 million canisters were running on 27 September 2026 across 67 subnets. It is also staked to govern the network and paid to node providers for hardware. No evidence was found that gambling or interest-based finance is a main use of the network, so the criterion gets the maximum score; the missing breakdown of apps by category is recorded as a data gap.

Fully paid spot ICP is available on major exchanges and can be held in one's own wallet.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. ICP trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on major exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance, and it can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet or held in the NNS app, where the owner controls it directly. Ownership does not depend on derivatives or leveraged wrappers, so the criterion gets the maximum score.

The network offers real computing services; the main harm was heavy retail losses after the 2021 launch.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is a working public computing platform that hosts about 1.16 million running canisters, with apps and their data kept on-chain. The score is lowered for a concrete historical harm: buyers who entered at launch in May 2021 lost most of their money as the price fell about 95% within a month, amid reported criticism of opaque token distribution; a US class action was dismissed in 2025 without findings against DFINITY. No evidence was found that the network is mainly a tool for fraud or sanctions evasion.