Bittensor

Holding TAO pays nothing; new TAO is paid to miners and validators for work the network scores, not as interest on a loan.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding TAO earns nothing. New TAO and subnet alpha are issued every block and split among subnet owners (18%), miners (41%) and validators with their stakers (41%). Miners are paid for producing work, such as AI model outputs, and validators for scoring it. Holders who stake delegate to a validator and receive a share of its dividends after the validator's take; the amount depends on how the validator and subnet perform, so it is variable, not a promised return.

There is no issuer earning for holders: new TAO pays for work, and fees are recycled rather than paid to a company.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns, and whether any of that income is impermissible. TAO was fair-launched with no pre-sale, and no company collects revenue on behalf of TAO holders. New emission is paid to subnet owners, miners, validators and stakers for building and running subnets. Registration costs and transaction fees are recycled (taken out of issuance), not paid to a treasury. Subnet owners receive 18% of their subnet's emission for designing its task, which is a payment for a service.

The network is used mainly to pay for AI work and computation; speculation on subnet tokens is counted under gambling.

This criterion looks at what the network is actually used for. Bittensor's main activity is paying miners and validators in its subnets for useful work, mostly AI tasks such as model inference and training, which falls under computation and infrastructure. TAO is also used to stake, to register on subnets and to pay fees. Some subnets serve trading or forecasting, and part of on-chain activity is trading subnet alpha tokens; that speculation is weighed under maysir rather than counted again here. No impermissible activity is shown to be the network's main purpose.

Fully paid spot TAO is widely available, and it can be held in one's own wallet.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. TAO trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on major exchanges such as Binance and OKX, and it can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet where the owner controls it directly. In the US, the Grayscale Bittensor Trust holds TAO itself and trades over the counter; its filings say the trust does not use leverage or derivatives and that its TAO will not be loaned or pledged. Ownership therefore does not depend on derivatives or leveraged wrappers.

Bittensor offers an open market for AI work; the 2024 theft and concentrated rewards are real harms but do not outweigh that benefit.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is an open network where anyone can contribute AI work and be paid for it, without a single company controlling access. The harms are real but moderate. In July 2024 about $8 million of TAO was stolen from users through a compromised software package; this was an attack on users, not a design built to exploit them. A June 2025 study of 64 subnets found that stake and rewards are highly concentrated and that rewards follow stake more than the quality of work, which weakens the fairness the network promises.