Arbitrum

Arbitrum is a busy working network, but ARB's only function is governance, and 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. The network behind ARB clearly works: Arbitrum One has processed about 2.7 billion transactions, and L2BEAT shows about $11.8 billion of value secured on it. But ARB is not needed to use the network, because gas is paid in ETH. Its value comes from governance: the right to vote on upgrades, the treasury and Security Council elections. A voting right over a working network and a treasury is a real benefit, yet it is narrower than a coin that pays for the network's services.

ARB is not a gambling token, but its trading is dominated by futures and its price has fallen about 90% from its peak.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and ARB has no chance-based payout. The market around it is heavily speculative, though. On 27 September 2026 perpetual futures made up about 85% of ARB/USDT volume on Binance, Bybit and OKX combined (about $282 million of futures against about $50 million of spot over 24 hours; a single-day snapshot). ARB traded around $0.23, about 90% below its January 2024 high of $2.39, while scheduled unlocks kept adding supply.

The DAO earns mostly service fees, but part of its income comes from tokenised US Treasury funds, and no breakdown is published to test the 5% threshold.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns. ArbitrumDAO earned $6.19 million in the first half of 2026 from four sources: Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost (an auction for a fast lane to order transactions), licence fees from chains built under the Arbitrum Expansion Program such as Robinhood Chain, and treasury income. The first three are fees for services. Selling transaction ordering is disputed by some as monetising MEV, though it is disclosed.

Supply, vesting and governance rules are public, but a 12-member Security Council can upgrade contracts instantly and the sequencer is run by one organisation.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Much is transparent: ARB's 10 billion supply, its allocation, the vesting schedule and the 2% yearly issuance cap are published, and the Foundation reports that about 92% of supply was unlocked or held by the DAO in August 2026, with the last 7.7% vesting by March 2027. Governance rules are set out in the Constitution. Two points leave real uncertainty.

Arbitrum is general infrastructure, but interest-based lending and perpetual futures are a large share of its DeFi activity.

This criterion looks at what the network is actually used for. Arbitrum is general-purpose infrastructure for cheaper Ethereum transactions, and chains such as Robinhood Chain are built on its technology. A large part of its DeFi activity is disputed or impermissible, though. By Liberandum's sum of DefiLlama protocol data on 27 September 2026, lending protocols held about $0.82 billion, roughly a third of about $2.4 billion of DeFi deposits outside bridges, with Aave V3 alone at about $0.54 billion.