Stellar

Holding XLM pays nothing: there is no staking, no inflation since 2019, and fees are locked away rather than paid to anyone.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. XLM has no built-in return of any kind. Stellar has no staking: validators are not paid and there is 'no concept of staking tokens'. The 1% yearly inflation that once paid new lumens to accounts that voted for it was ended by validator vote on 28 October 2019. Transaction fees go into a locked pool that no one can spend. Interest can only arise if a holder chooses to lend XLM on a platform, which is assessed under trading mechanisms, not as a feature of the coin, so the criterion gets the full score.

Stellar is a working payment network and XLM is needed to use it.

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. Stellar clearly works: SDF reported 10.7 million active accounts and $11.4 billion of stablecoin transfers in Q2 2026, and every account must hold XLM as a minimum balance and pay fees in it. In 2018 the Bahrain-licensed Shariyah Review Bureau certified Stellar for payments and tokenisation, including uses of XLM, and screeners such as Sharlife, Islamic Finance Guru, ShariaQuant and CryptoUmmah rate it favourably; these are tier-2 views commissioned or published by advisory firms.

XLM is not a gambling token and the network is used mainly for payments, but most XLM trading on the largest exchange is in futures.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and XLM has no chance-based payout. Stellar also lacks a large memecoin or betting scene: its on-chain activity is dominated by stablecoin transfers (about $10 billion over 30 days in September 2026, per rwa.xyz) and tokenised assets. The trading of XLM itself is speculative, though: on 27 September 2026 perpetual futures were about 83% of XLM/USDT volume on Binance (a single-day snapshot on one exchange), and XLM trades about 75% below its January 2018 peak.

The protocol earns nothing for anyone and validators are unpaid; the SDF's own investment income is not published but does not flow to XLM holders.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns, and whether any of that income is impermissible. Stellar has no company collecting revenue for XLM holders: transaction fees go into a locked account 'not given to or used by anyone', and validators receive no block rewards or fee share. The closest thing to an issuer is the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit that holds about 14.8 billion XLM and uses it to fund development, grants and investments in companies and protocols.

Supply is fixed and the code is open; the foundation controls about 30% of all XLM and is re-organising how it discloses those holdings.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Much of Stellar is transparent: supply has been fixed at about 50 billion XLM since inflation ended in 2019, the software is open source, protocol upgrades need validator votes, and the ledger shows every account. The main uncertainty is concentration. SDF holds about 14.76 billion XLM (about 29.5% of supply) across four buckets and can sell, grant or invest it under its mandate; this overhang is larger than most planned token unlocks.

Stellar is mainly a payment rail; most of its tokenised assets are interest-bearing government debt and funds, and lending leads its small DeFi sector.

This criterion looks at what the network is actually used for. Much of it is permissible: stablecoin payments and remittances (a record $11.4 billion of transfers in Q2 2026), MoneyGram's MGUSD, USDC, EURC and, since September 2026, USDT0. A notable share is interest-based. Of about $3.4 billion of tokenised real-world assets, most is tokenised Treasury bills, bonds and money market funds, such as Spiko's T-bill funds ($1.7 billion), Ondo ($536 million) and Franklin Templeton's BENJI ($514 million), plus Figure's yield-bearing dollar YLDS.

Fully paid spot XLM is widely available and can be held in one's own wallet.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. XLM trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on major exchanges such as Binance, and it can be withdrawn to a self-custody Stellar wallet where the owner controls it directly. In the US it is also held by the Grayscale Stellar Lumens Trust, which is quoted over the counter, holds only XLM and says it uses no leverage or derivatives. Ownership therefore does not depend on derivatives or leveraged wrappers, so the criterion gets the full score.

Stellar brings clear benefit as a cheap remittance and payment rail, with no major abuse pattern found.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is clear: Stellar was built to move money cheaply across borders, fees average about one hundredth of a cent, and it links digital wallets to cash networks such as MoneyGram, which matters for remittances. SDF reported 99.99%+ uptime and no core protocol security incidents in the first half of 2026. Stellar has no mining, so its energy use is small. No large pattern of fraud or sanctions evasion tied to the network was found in this review, though this was not researched in depth.