Aster

Holding ASTER pays nothing and staking is not a loan, but most staking rewards now come from buybacks funded by derivatives fees, which include funding payments.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ASTER earns nothing. Staked ASTER earns from two weekly pools. The Base pool (150,000 ASTER) is shared by Aster Chain validators in proportion to the transactions they process, which is a reward for network work. The Loyalty pool (300,000 ASTER plus every fee buyback since 17 June 2026) is shared by how long holders lock their tokens and is boosted by their own trading volume. It is not a fixed or guaranteed return on a loan, so it is not plain riba.

ASTER is used for staking and listing votes on a working exchange chain, but it gives no claim on the business, and religious bodies disagree on whether crypto is property (mal).

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. ASTER has real uses: it is staked with Aster Chain validators, validators with at least 20 million ASTER vote on which markets are listed, and it pays trading fees at a 5% discount. The exchange behind it is heavily used. ASTER gives no legal claim on Aster's revenue or assets, although fee buybacks send value to stakers.

ASTER is not itself a betting token, but its value comes from a platform built around very high leverage and a prediction market, and most ASTER trading is in futures.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir. ASTER has no chance-based payout of its own and has governance and staking functions. The platform it supports, however, is built around speculation: Aster offers up to 1001x leverage on Bitcoin, 500x on forex in Shield Mode, and since 15 June 2026 a prediction market where shares pay 1 USDT if an outcome happens and 0 if not. CryptoUmmah describes 1001x leverage as structurally close to gambling.

The token contract has a fixed supply and buybacks are on-chain, but the core chain is closed source, the CEO is pseudonymous, volume data was questioned and most supply is still to be released.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty in a contract. Some things are clear: the ASTER contract on BNB Chain has no mint or owner function and a fixed supply of 8 billion, the allocation is published, and buybacks and burns go through public wallets (about 204 million ASTER sat in the burn address on 27 September 2026). Other things are opaque. Aster says the core Aster Chain contracts and RPC infrastructure are not open source, and its published audits cover only earn and stablecoin products, not the perpetuals engine. CryptoUmmah reports that the CEO is pseudonymous.

Aster offers self-custody trading, but it markets extreme leverage and all-or-nothing outcome trading to retail users, and its volume data has been questioned.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. Aster gives traders self-custody, low fees and a spot market, and its privacy features stop others from hunting traders' visible positions. On the other side, it markets leverage of up to 1001x, where a price move of about 0.1% against a position can wipe it out, and a prediction market where shares pay all or nothing. In October 2025 DefiLlama stopped showing Aster's futures volume over wash-trading concerns.