Every question, answered short.

There is no single answer for all of crypto, because crypto is not one thing. Each coin is a different project with different tokenomics, and the ruling follows the project. Bitcoin and Ethereum pass our screen, while a lending protocol that pays interest does not, so the honest answer is that you screen the asset rather than the asset class.

Yes on our screen. Bitcoin has no interest mechanism, no issuer who owes you anything, and no gambling built into it, so the three usual prohibitions do not attach. The scholarly disagreement about Bitcoin is almost never about riba, it is about whether a digital asset counts as wealth at all.

They disagree less than the headlines suggest. Almost every position turns on one question, whether a digital token qualifies as mal, meaning recognised property. Scholars who answer yes tend to permit spot ownership of clean assets, and scholars who answer no rule the whole category out, which is why two respected muftis can look at the same coin and part ways.

This is the question underneath every other crypto ruling. Mufti Taqi Usmani ruled crypto impermissible mainly on the grounds that it is not mal, since it has no physical existence and no intrinsic use. The counter position, adopted in Malaysia and elsewhere, is that mal is established by what a society treats as valuable property, and crypto now clears that bar.

Not by itself, but plenty of what people do with it is. Maysir is about the structure of the contract, not how nervous the trade makes you feel. If your gain requires someone else to lose, and the whole thing is decided by an event you have no stake in, that is a wager, and buying and holding an asset you own is not.

Riba is a guaranteed increase on a loan of money, and crypto puts it in at least nine places that do not use the word interest. Lending products, borrow markets, funding rates on perpetuals, and most things labelled Earn are the common ones. The tell is simple, if you were promised a return for parting with your coins and getting them back later, you are looking at a loan with an increase.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty about what you are actually buying or what you will actually get. Across the assets we have screened it disqualifies more projects than riba does, usually because the tokenomics are undisclosed, the supply can be changed at will, or the thing the token entitles you to was never defined.

Maysir is gambling, and the fiqh definition is precise. You need a zero sum transfer that depends on an uncertain event, where each side can only win what the other loses, and neither side is producing anything. Prediction markets and binary options hit that definition even when they market themselves as information tools.

Volatility on its own does not make something haram. Gold, property and equities all swing in price and none of them are prohibited for that reason. What fiqh prohibits is uncertainty inside the contract, not movement in the market price after you own the thing.

No, and if it did then every currency in your wallet would fail too, because no government has backed its money with gold since 1971. Classical scholarship accepted fulus, meaning token money with no intrinsic value, as valid currency by custom. This is why the gold backing argument is rarely the one serious scholars use against crypto.

For one influential framework, yes. Some scholars make permissibility depend partly on whether your regulator recognises the asset, which means the same coin can get a different answer in Malaysia than it does in Egypt. Legality and permissibility are still two separate questions, and you need both before you buy.

One failure is enough. The coin fails if its core business is prohibited, such as lending at interest or running a casino, if its tokenomics contain a guaranteed return that functions as riba, or if what you are buying is too undefined to be a valid sale. Most rejected projects fail on tokenomics rather than on the headline business.

No, and not for one reason. You never take ownership of the asset, both sides of the exchange are deferred when fiqh requires at least one to be immediate, the funding rate on perpetuals is riba, and the position is zero sum so someone has to lose for you to win. Any one of those would be enough on its own.

No. Margin is a loan, you pay interest on it by the hour, and that is riba in its clearest form. Even the versions advertised as interest free fail, because the lender still keeps the right to liquidate your position on their terms, which is not a loan any Islamic contract recognises.

No, because leverage is borrowed money and in every mainstream venue it carries a financing cost. Even at 2x you are trading with funds you do not own, on terms set by a lender who can close you out. Spot only means the amount you can lose is the amount you actually put in.

It can be, and holding period is not what decides it. Three conditions do the work, you must genuinely own the asset, settlement must be immediate rather than deferred, and there must be no borrowed money involved. Buying and selling spot Bitcoin twice in one afternoon breaks none of those.

No. Short selling requires you to sell something you do not own, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, prohibited selling what you do not have. It also normally runs on a borrowed asset with a fee attached, which adds riba on top of the original problem.

Yes, provided you are holding spot positions in screened assets with no borrowed funds. Swing trading just means holding for days or weeks instead of minutes, and the length of the hold was never the deciding factor. Ownership, settlement and no debt are what you check.

On a spot venue with no leverage, the contract itself is valid, because you are buying and selling assets you own with immediate settlement. The practical problem is different, scalping loses money for most people who attempt it, and fee drag turns a break even strategy into a losing one. Permissible is not the same as wise.

It is halal, and the doubt is worth taking seriously rather than waving away. Fortune telling claims knowledge of the unseen, which is a grave matter in Islam. Reading a chart is reading a record of what buyers and sellers have already done, which is closer to a farmer reading the sky, so long as you never speak about the future with certainty.

It depends on the bot. Spot grid and DCA bots are fine because they place ordinary buy and sell orders on assets you own. Futures grid and leveraged bots are not, and copy trading depends entirely on what the person you are copying is doing.

Islamic law has handled this for centuries under wakala, the law of agency. An agent acts within the authority you granted, and you carry responsibility for what you authorised. So the agent is permissible if the trades it is allowed to make are permissible, and giving a bot open ended permission to trade anything is where people get into trouble.

Only if the trader you copy is doing halal things, and most of the leaderboard is not. Copy trading executes their decisions in your account, so if they open a leveraged perpetual, you opened a leveraged perpetual. You inherit the ruling along with the position.

Usually not, and the name does a lot of quiet work. Swap free removes the overnight interest charge and keeps the leverage, keeps the deferred settlement, and still never gives you the asset. Removing one of four problems does not fix the contract.

Exchanging one currency for another is permissible when both sides settle on the spot, which is why the bureau de change at the airport is fine. Retail forex is a different product, built on leverage, overnight financing and contracts that never deliver the currency. That version fails.

No. An option sells you a right rather than an asset, and fiqh does not recognise a bare right as something that can be bought and sold. Add the deferred settlement and the zero sum payoff and it fails on several counts at once.

You sell. Taking profit, moving to cash or a screened stablecoin, and sitting out a downtrend are all positions, and none of them require borrowing an asset you do not own. Being flat during a fall is how spot traders express a bearish view.

Yes. There is no obligation to stay invested, and choosing not to hold a falling asset is simply a decision about your own property. Just be aware that cash still counts toward your zakat if you hold it across your zakat date.

Native proof of stake staking is halal, and we say so plainly. You keep ownership of your coins, you carry real risk through slashing, and the reward varies with the work performed, so it is a fee for a service rather than a loan with an increase. Four other products borrow the word staking and pay you interest instead.

The staking underneath is fine, and the receipt token is where the questions start. You are handed a tradeable claim on a staked position, and the ruling depends on whether that claim is a genuine ownership share or a debt instrument dressed as one. Read the specific protocol before assuming it inherits the verdict on native staking.

No. You hand over coins, you get the same coins back later plus an agreed extra, and that is the textbook definition of riba. It does not matter whether the platform is called Aave, Nexo or something friendlier.

No, and paying riba carries its own warning in the texts, not just receiving it. What is worth knowing is that lending itself is a good deed in Islam when no increase is attached, so a genuinely interest free loan between two people is rewarded rather than prohibited.

Binance Earn is not one product, it is roughly a dozen, and most of them pay you interest. Flexible Savings and the fixed term products are lending, so they fail. On chain staking through the same menu is a different contract and can pass, which is why the answer has to be product by product.

It depends where the yield comes from, and most farms will not tell you plainly. If the return is your share of trading fees earned by a pool you own part of, that can be valid. If it is interest paid by borrowers in a lending market, it is riba with extra steps.

Supplying two assets you own to a pool and taking a share of the trading fees is closer to a partnership than a loan, and the fee income itself is earned for a service. The problems are impermissible loss, which is a real risk you are accepting, and the fact that many pools pair a clean asset with a coin that fails screening.

An airdrop is a gift, hibah, and receiving a gift is permissible. The catch is what you were given, because a free token from a lending protocol is still a stake in a lending protocol. Screen the project before you claim, and screen it again before you sell.

Yes for a clean network. Mining is work, you spend real electricity and real hardware to secure a network and you are paid for the output, which is a recognised form of earning. The ruling follows the network you are mining, so mining a coin that fails our screen does not become permissible because you mined it yourself.

Most cloud mining contracts fail, and the reason is gharar rather than riba. You are paying today for an undefined amount of future output from equipment you cannot inspect, operated by a company with no obligation to show you it exists. When the thing being sold cannot be identified, the sale is not valid.

Paying today for a token that does not exist yet is a sale of something absent, and Islamic law has a specific framework for that. It turns on three questions, whether the thing is precisely defined, whether the delivery date is fixed, and whether the price is paid in full up front. Most presales fail the first two.

Being paid for playing is permissible in principle, since it is earning for effort. Two things commonly break it, an entry fee that you only recover by beating other players, which makes it a wager, and game assets sold as speculative investments with no defined utility. Check whether you had to pay to enter before you could earn.

A payment for introducing a customer is a commission for a service, which is permissible. What matters is what you are referring people to. Earning a cut of the fees your friends pay on leverage trades makes you a partner in something you should not be helping with.

Cashback on a debit style card that spends your own balance is a discount on your purchase, and discounts are fine. Cashback on a credit card is the harder case, because a benefit attached to a loan is exactly the shape riba takes, and many scholars avoid it for that reason.

Most stablecoins pay you nothing, so Muslims assume they are safe, and the real problem is somewhere else. It is that the issuer can freeze your balance, which means what you hold is a permission rather than outright ownership. Reserve quality and freeze powers vary a lot between issuers.

Holding it to move between trades is where most people use it, and the issues to weigh are the freeze function and what sits behind the reserves. Tether's reserves include interest bearing instruments, which is a separate concern from whether you personally earn interest. We rank each stablecoin individually rather than treating them as one group.

Ethereum passes as a network and as an asset. Gas fees pay for computation, staking pays for validation work, and neither is a loan with an increase. What runs on top of Ethereum is a separate question, because the network being clean does not clean the lending protocols deployed on it.

Not automatically, and this surprises people. A meme coin with fixed supply, no team allocation and no promised return contains no riba and no lending, so there is nothing in the contract to prohibit. Where they fail is usually gharar, an undisclosed supply or a team wallet that can dump on you, and the way most people buy them is closer to a wager than a purchase.

An NFT is a certificate of ownership, so the ruling follows what it certifies. A token attached to genuine digital work or a usable licence can be a valid sale. It fails when the underlying content is prohibited, when the token grants nothing definable, which is gharar, or when the only reason to buy is to sell it to a greater fool.

Almost every project calls its token a utility token, which is why the label decides very little. Aave has genuine, working utility and still fails our screen, because the utility is governing a lending market. Utility has to mean the token does something necessary in a business that is itself permissible.

The test is what the exchange earns and what the token entitles you to. A fee discount token on a venue whose main revenue is spot trading is a different case from a token whose value comes from a business built on leverage and lending. Look at where the revenue comes from before you look at the token.

Privacy is not prohibited in Islam, and keeping your finances away from strangers is normal and permissible. The concerns raised about privacy coins are mostly about how third parties use them and about regulatory status in your country, which is a legality question rather than a fiqh one.

A governance token gives you a vote over a protocol, so the ruling follows the protocol you would be governing. Voting rights over a decentralised exchange that settles spot trades is a very different thing from voting rights over a lending market that sets interest rates.

No. They call themselves information markets rather than betting, but Islamic law tests the structure of the contract and the structure is a wager. You stake money on an uncertain event, your gain is funded entirely by the person on the other side, and nothing is produced.

HYPE passes the property test and has real gas utility, real staking and real adoption, which is exactly why it is a useful example. It still fails, because the business the token is built on is perpetual futures, and decentralising a prohibited product does not change the product.

Two tokens can track the same company with one passing and one failing, which is what makes this different from ordinary equity screening. You have to screen the company and then screen the wrapper, because some tokenized stocks give you a real claim on shares held in custody and others give you a synthetic exposure backed by a derivative.

Manipulation is a sin committed by the manipulator, and it does not automatically make the asset prohibited for you. What it does change is the gharar assessment, because a token where a handful of wallets can move the price at will is a token where you cannot reasonably know what you are buying into. Supply concentration is part of our screen for exactly this reason.

Yes, if your total zakatable wealth sits above the nisab for a full lunar year. Crypto held as an investment is treated as a tradeable asset, which means the whole market value counts, not just the profit.

Take the market value of your holdings on your zakat date and pay 2.5% of that figure. The most common mistake is paying 2.5% of the profit instead of 2.5% of the total, which produces the wrong number in both directions depending on the year.

Yes. Zakat is assessed on what you own on your zakat date, not on what you have sold, so a position that quadrupled is valued at today's price even if you have not touched it. Once you understand why, most other zakat questions answer themselves.

The gold nisab is 85 grams and the silver nisab is 595 grams, and they give very different thresholds at today's prices. Using silver sets a lower bar, which means more people owe zakat and more of it reaches the poor, and that is the position most contemporary scholars favour for cash and trade goods.

Yes. Staked coins are still yours, so they count at market value on your zakat date, and the rewards you have received count too. A short unbonding period does not remove the obligation, it only affects when you can practically pay it.

This is one of the genuinely disputed cases and scholars differ. One view treats locked tokens like a debt you cannot yet collect, so zakat is paid when they unlock. Another treats them as owned property from day one. Pick a position with your own scholar and apply it consistently year to year.

Yes, once they are yours and claimable. A gift you own is wealth you own, so it joins the rest of your zakatable assets at market value on your zakat date. Tokens still sitting unclaimed with no confirmed allocation are a different matter.

If you bought it intending to resell it, it is trade goods and you pay 2.5% of what it is worth on your zakat date. If you hold it as a personal item with no resale intention, the majority view is that no zakat is due, the same way your car is exempt.

It is the anniversary, in the lunar calendar, of the day your wealth first crossed the nisab and stayed above it. If you genuinely cannot reconstruct that date, pick a fixed date such as the first of Ramadan and keep it for good.

Purification means giving away the portion of your income that came from a prohibited source, without counting it as charity or expecting reward for it. Almost every otherwise halal asset carries a small purification duty, and almost nobody pays it.

You purify the impermissible share, not the whole return. Take the percentage of the project's income that comes from prohibited sources and apply it to what you received, so a 3% impermissible share on a 100 dollar gain means 3 dollars goes out. Purification is also not a fix for an asset that fails outright.

To a public benefit where you take no reward and no advantage from the giving, so general charity, medical costs for the poor, or infrastructure. It should not go to your own family, it should not be used to reduce your taxes, and it does not count toward your zakat.

You can use a mixed exchange for the halal part of what it offers, in the same way you can buy bread from a shop that also sells things you avoid. Keep to spot, and switch off the products that put you in a prohibited contract. The exchange is not the ruling, the product you press is.

Same principle as any large exchange. Buying and selling spot is fine, and the products to leave alone are the ones that pay you a yield on your balance or lend against your holdings. Turn off the earn features and read what your account is enrolled in by default.

Margin and futures permissions, auto enrolment into savings or earn products, any auto conversion of small balances into the exchange token, and lending of your assets to other users. Several of these are on by default and pay you interest without you ever choosing it.

Turn it off first, then dispose of what you already received by giving it away without expecting reward. You do not keep it and you do not count it as sadaqah. If the setting cannot be disabled, that is a reason to move your funds.

Swapping one token for another with immediate settlement is a valid exchange, and a DEX does that well. Being decentralised is not itself a ruling though, since a decentralised perpetuals venue is still a perpetuals venue. Judge the product, not the architecture.

Possession in fiqh means actual control, which makes a private key the strongest form of ownership available to you. Exchange balances are a claim on a company rather than the asset itself, which is weaker but still recognised. Self custody creates its own problem, because a key nobody else knows is an inheritance your family cannot reach.

Yes, and it is one of the cleanest ways to buy, because both sides hand over their side in the same session. Watch for two things, an escrow that holds your funds and pays a yield, and price spreads so wide they stop being a sale and start being a fee for waiting.

Yes, and it is often far cheaper than the alternative, since banks can charge close to 10% on a small transfer. The fee itself is permissible, which surprises people, because charging for a service is not riba. The problems enter through the exchange rate spread and through providers who advance the money and charge for the delay.

It is part of your estate and must be distributed according to Islamic inheritance rules, which only works if your heirs can actually reach it. A seed phrase nobody else knows destroys the wealth rather than passing it on. Leave clear written instructions with someone you trust, stored separately from the keys themselves.

You would be agreeing to terms and then breaking them, and Muslims are bound by the contracts they enter. On top of that you may be breaking the law where you live, and your funds have no protection if the exchange later closes the account. Find a venue that serves your country instead.

Owning a share means owning a piece of a real business, which is permissible in principle. It fails when the business itself is prohibited, such as a bank or a brewery, or when the company carries too much interest bearing debt. That second test is what stock screening exists to measure.

Three thresholds do the work. Interest bearing debt must stay under 30% of market cap, interest bearing deposits and investments under 30%, and income from prohibited activities under 5% of total income. Passing all three still leaves you with a purification duty on that small impermissible share.

Yes, if the company earns any income from prohibited sources, which nearly all listed companies do through interest on cash balances. Multiply your dividend by the company's impermissible income percentage and give that portion away. Companies that publish a purification rate have done the arithmetic for you.

An ETF is a basket, so the ruling depends on what is in it and how the fund is built. A physically backed fund tracking a screened index can pass, while a synthetic ETF that gets its exposure through a swap contract rather than owning the assets fails on the wrapper alone.

Gold is permissible to own, and the condition is that the exchange settles immediately, since gold is one of the six commodities the hadith names specifically. Physical gold and fully allocated accounts satisfy that. Gold CFDs and futures do not, because nothing is ever delivered.

Owning a share of a property and taking a share of the rent is a partnership, and that is permissible. Read carefully though, because many platforms are structured as loans to a developer with a fixed return, which is riba wearing a property label. Fixed return is the word to look for.

A bond is a loan and the coupon is interest, which is why bonds are out. A sukuk is meant to give you ownership of an underlying asset and a share of what that asset earns, so your return rises and falls with it. Some sukuk in the market are structured to behave like bonds, so the label alone is not enough.

The interest it pays is riba, yes. Keeping a current account for practical reasons is a different matter and is widely permitted where no interest is paid. If your account pays interest you cannot switch off, dispose of it the way you would any prohibited income.

Screen the asset, buy it spot on an exchange with margin and futures switched off, and size the position so a loss does not hurt your family. That is the whole shape of it. The hard part is not the rules, it is the discipline to keep to them when the chart is moving.

Less than most people assume, and the first amount should be small enough that losing it teaches you something rather than damaging you. What matters more than the size is that it is money you do not need, is not borrowed, and is not owed to anyone.

It is a way of reading a chart by finding the price areas where large orders previously overwhelmed the other side and caused a sharp move. Those zones tend to matter again when price returns to them. It suits spot only trading because it gives you defined places to buy without needing leverage to make the trade worthwhile.

Market structure is the sequence of highs and lows that tells you whether a market is trending up, trending down or going sideways. You read it on the higher timeframe first and then work down, because a buy that looks good on the 15 minute chart often looks reckless on the daily.

Each candle shows four prices for its time period, the open, the high, the low and the close. The body is the distance between open and close, the wicks are how far price went and got rejected, and long wicks are usually the most informative part.

Size it by what you are willing to lose, not by how confident you feel. Decide the maximum percentage of your account you will risk on one idea, then work backwards from your invalidation level to the number of coins. Doing it in that order is what stops one bad trade from ending your account.

Yes, and there is nothing in fiqh that discourages it, since protecting your wealth is an obligation rather than a lack of tawakkul. A stop is just an instruction to sell your own property at a price you chose in advance, when you were calm.

For most people with a job and a family, yes. Buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule removes the decision that people get wrong most often, which is when to buy. It also fits the Muslim investor well because it rewards patience over prediction.

Position sizing and impatience, far more often than bad analysis. People risk too much on one idea, then double down to recover, then abandon a rule they set for themselves the previous week. Muslim traders carry an extra version of this, taking a haram shortcut after a run of losses and calling it necessity.

Signals fail the people who follow them, and the reason is structural rather than dishonest. You receive an entry without the reasoning, so you cannot judge when the idea has been invalidated, and you exit late every time. Learn to read the chart yourself, even slowly.

We ask whether the asset is property at all, then run it through three layers covering the business activity, the tokenomics and the contract structure. One failure in any layer is enough to reject it. The whole method is published rather than kept behind a login.

The reasoning follows published rulings from recognised scholars and standards bodies, and every verdict page shows which principle it turned on so you can check the working. We publish the fatwas we rely on rather than asking you to take our word for it.

Yes, when the project changes. A token that adds a lending market or alters its emission schedule can move from pass to fail, and that has happened. Screening a coin once and treating the answer as permanent is how people end up holding something that stopped being permissible.

The screener, the verdicts, the glossary, the zakat calculator and every article are free. Paid plans add deeper analysis, the courses and mentorship. You do not need to pay anything to find out whether a coin passes.

Yes. Ask in the community and we will queue it, and paid members get their requests prioritised. Newly launched tokens usually take longer because there is less published tokenomics detail to verify.

No. What we publish is Shariah screening and education, which tells you whether an asset is permissible, not whether it is a good buy at today's price. Those are different questions and only you can answer the second one for your situation.