NFTs

Almost every ruling written on NFTs skips what the token technically is, and then reasons about something that does not exist.

What you actually own

An NFT is a row in a smart contract. Under Ethereum's ERC-721 standard that row holds a token id, the owner's address, and a link.

The image is not on the blockchain. It is almost never on the blockchain, because storing a few megabytes on Ethereum would cost more than most of the art was worth.

So the token points somewhere else. Sometimes that is IPFS, where a file is addressed by a hash of its own contents and cannot be quietly swapped. Often it is an ordinary server owned by whoever minted it.

Which means that if the project stops paying its hosting bill, your token points at nothing. The row survives. The picture does not.

You own the row. You were sold the art. Those are two different claims.

Why that is a fiqh question

Ask ten holders of the same collection what their token entitles them to and you will get several different answers. A licence to the image? Commercial rights? Access to something promised in a roadmap?

That is not a communication failure, it is gharar. A sale needs both sides to know what changed hands, and most of the 2021 market could not clear that bar.

Note what this does not say. Not haram for being digital, and not haram for being expensive. A silly price is not a prohibition.

The second question

Mufti Faraz Adam's framework asks whether the thing has lawful benefit, not just a price, and the line worth remembering is that something may have financial value and still have no utility from a Shariah lens.

There is also a separate dispute about images of living beings, which lands on a large share of the market on its own if you follow the stricter position. Most guides leave it out because it complicates a clean answer.

Where they pass cleanly

Domain names, event tickets, credentials, and title deeds to identified assets. In each of those the utility is the point, and the token is the thing rather than a receipt pointing at a file on someone's server.

In one line: ask what the token points at, whether that pointer can break, and what you could claim if the issuer disappeared tomorrow.