Every Haram Coin on Our List, and What Breaks It

Twenty-one of the ninety-one assets we have screened come back Haram.

The useful thing is not the list. The useful thing is that twenty-one failures reduce to five mechanisms, and once you can recognise the five you can assess a token you have never heard of faster than you can read its landing page.

Here they are, worst offender first, with every failing asset filed under the mechanism that actually broke it.

Mechanism 1: lending money at interest

The oldest and simplest failure. Money now for more money later, with the surplus tied to the passage of time.

Aave. A decentralised money market built entirely around interest-bearing lending and borrowing. The AAVE token's governance utility and its Safety Module staking yield both derive from that activity. Aave has no exposure to prohibited industries at all: no alcohol, no adult content, no weapons. Its business is lending at interest, which was always enough on its own.

NEXO. A lending platform token, failing on the same structure.

What trips people up here is that they came to DeFi to escape the bank. Removing the intermediary does not change the contract. Riba al-qard is a property of the agreement, not of who administers it, and a smart contract enforces it more reliably than a bank ever did.

Mechanism 2: tokenized conventional debt

This is now the largest failure category, and it is growing faster than any other. Take an interest-bearing traditional instrument, wrap it in a token, and sell it as innovation.

Circle USYC is the most direct case on the entire list. It is a tokenized money market fund holding short-term US Treasury bills and reverse repurchase agreements. The holder's token value automatically accrues that interest as net asset value rises. You are not near the riba, you are receiving it, passively, by holding.

Ondo fails all three of our evaluation criteria at once: business activity, token utility, and revenue purity. Its core business tokenizes conventional bank deposits and interest-bearing government debt.

Dai, Sky and USDS are one ecosystem and they fail together. Revenue comes from stability fees charged on collateralised crypto loans plus interest earned on tokenized real-world assets like Treasuries and private credit. Over 33% of protocol revenue comes from those non-compliant sources, against an AAOIFI screen that fails anything above 5%. Governance holders benefit from surpluses funding token buybacks, and the opt-in Sky Savings Rate pays yield funded entirely by interest revenue.

USDD and World Liberty Financial round out the category.

The marketing language to watch for is real-world assets, RWA, tokenized yield, and on-chain Treasuries. Every one of those phrases means the same thing: you are being offered interest with better graphics. The yield has to come from somewhere, and if the somewhere is a government bond, it is riba whether the wrapper is a fund unit or an ERC-20.

Mechanism 3: derivatives and funding rates

Perpetual futures never expire, so the protocol charges funding rates to keep the contract price near spot. Those are periodic payments between longs and shorts for holding leveraged exposure over time. Payment for time on borrowed value is riba, and the leverage adds maysir on top.

Hyperliquid. A Layer 1 that integrates a perpetuals exchange at the consensus level, earns yield on trader collateral, takes over 33% of revenue from non-compliant sources, and recycles roughly 99% of retained trading fees into automated HYPE buybacks. The token has genuine gas and staking utility and passes the property test, which is exactly why it makes such a clean example: real utility does not survive tokenomics that funnel derivatives revenue into your asset's price. There is a full breakdown of this one if you want the layer-by-layer reasoning.

Aster. Same category.

Ethena USDe is the one to watch, because it is sold as a stablecoin and most people will never look further. USDe holds its peg by delta-hedging with short perpetual futures positions. Funding rates are not a side business here, they are the stability mechanism itself. When funding turns negative, its reserve fund rotates into Treasury-yielding stablecoins to protect the peg. There is no leg of this structure that is not riba. It does earn some permissible income from proof-of-stake validation, which is worth acknowledging and is nowhere near enough.

Jupiter. A DEX aggregator that also operates perpetual futures. Compare it to Uniswap, which is Halal because pure automated market maker fees are ujrah, a service charge. Same sector, opposite verdicts, and the difference is the perps.

Mechanism 4: exchange tokens funded by non-compliant desks

HTX DAO, Gate, Bitget Token.

These are the tokens of centralised venues whose revenue includes margin and futures trading. Each individual assessment is on its own page, and the pattern is consistent: the token's value derives from the exchange's earnings, and those earnings include the activity Muslims are avoiding.

Worth contrasting this with BNB, which we rate Doubtful rather than Haram. BNB is a genuinely sound utility token on a neutral network with clean protocol revenue, fixed rule-based minting, and valid staking. Its problem is association: deep, ongoing ties to an exchange with non-compliant desks. That is a real defect and it is not the same defect as a token whose value is the non-compliant revenue. The gap between those two is why we have three labels instead of two.

Mechanism 5: wagering

Opinion is a prediction market, and prediction markets are maysir. A contract created solely to resolve to 1 or 0, producing no value, where one party's gain is precisely the other's loss.

Two more belong here even though neither has a token to rate. Polymarket and Kalshi both fail on their core business, Kalshi with leveraged perpetuals on top and capital explicitly raised to expand those markets. Neither has ever minted a native cryptocurrency, which means every presale you have been offered in either name is a confirmed scam. If you were about to buy one, the ruling is your second problem. There is a full piece on prediction markets covering why the information-market defence does not work.

The remaining four

Rain, LAB, Official Trump, Rootstock Infrastructure Framework. Each fails for reasons specific to its own structure, set out on its own assessment page rather than summarised into a pattern it does not fit.

Screen a new token in ten minutes

The five mechanisms give you a working procedure. Run any token through these questions in order and stop at the first yes.

Does anyone pay a rate for the passage of time? Lending APY, borrow APR, funding rate, stability fee, savings rate. If yes, mechanism 1 or 3, and you are done.

Where does the yield come from? If the answer is a government bond, a bank deposit, a loan, or a repo, you have mechanism 2 regardless of how the wrapper is described. Yield does not appear from nowhere. Something is paying it, and you need to know what.

Does the protocol resolve bets? If the product creates a contract that pays out on an external event, mechanism 5.

Does the token's value get funded by any of the above? This is the question almost nobody asks and it is the one that caught Hyperliquid. Look for buyback mechanisms, fee-sharing, revenue distribution to stakers. A clean token financed by a dirty revenue stream is not clean.

What percentage of revenue is non-compliant? Below 5%, purify and hold. Above 5%, the asset fails. That threshold is AAOIFI's and it is set out in our methodology.

Five questions. Most tokens fail or clear on the first two.

What the failures tell you about the market

One pattern is worth naming. The fastest-growing failure category is tokenized conventional debt. Three years ago the haram assets in crypto were mostly gambling apps and lending protocols, which at least looked like what they were. Now the growth is in instruments that wrap Treasury bills and money market funds and market themselves as stable, boring, institutional-grade infrastructure.

For a Muslim investor this is a harder environment, not an easier one, because the new failures do not look reckless. They look responsible. USYC is a well-run tokenized money market fund and that is exactly the problem: it is a well-run vehicle for receiving interest.

The second pattern is that the word in front of the token tells you nothing. DEX, DeFi, stablecoin, Layer 1, RWA. We have assets on both sides of every one of those labels. Uniswap passes and Jupiter does not. Ethereum passes and Hyperliquid does not. RLUSD passes and USDe does not.

Which is the whole reason we publish reasoning instead of a green tick. All 91 assessments, including the 41 that pass, are on the screening list, and final religious authority on any of them rests with a qualified scholar.