Ethena

Holding ENA pays nothing today, but an approved fee switch will direct revenue that includes interest to ENA buybacks once USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ENA earns nothing, and Ethena's docs describe sENA (staked ENA) as a route to governance, not as a share of revenue. The link to interest is indirect but real. Ethena's revenue includes interest paid by borrowers in DeFi lending markets such as Aave and Morpho, interest on loans to institutions, and yields on tokenised short-term government debt.

ENA is a working governance token of a large protocol, but its only function is to govern that protocol, and official 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. ENA has a real function: holders vote on the composition of USDe backing, new backing strategies, the future use of protocol revenue and the members of the Risk Committee, and the protocol it governs held about $5.4 billion in late September 2026. It has no other use such as paying network fees.

ENA is not a gambling token, but about 89% of its trading is in perpetual futures, and the protocol it governs earns from leveraged traders' funding payments.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and ENA has no chance-based payout. The market around it is highly speculative, though. On 27 September 2026 perpetual futures made up about 89% of ENA/USDT trading volume on Binance, Bybit and OKX (about $556 million of futures against $66 million of spot, a single-day snapshot). ENA's price has swung widely: it fell about 95% from its high of $1.52 in April 2024 to about $0.07 on 30 June 2026 and has since risen to about $0.27.

Supply and vesting are public, but the protocol relies on off-chain custodians, exchanges and Ethena-controlled keys, and governance votes draw very low turnout.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Some things are clear: ENA's supply is fixed at 15 billion, about 10.1 billion were circulating on 27 September 2026, and team and investor tokens vest monthly until about March 2028 on a published schedule. Ethena publishes a transparency dashboard and custodian attestations. But much of the system is off-chain and depends on trust.

Ethena offers dollar access outside banks, but its model rewards and encourages leverage, and USDe supply fell by about two thirds after the October 2025 crash.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit Ethena claims is a dollar that does not rely on bank deposits, plus savings and payment products for people outside the banking system. The harms are notable. The yield exists because other traders pay to hold leveraged positions, and part of the revenue is used to reward leveraged positions on Aave; when many users borrowed against sUSDe to 'loop' the yield, the 10 October 2025 market liquidation triggered heavy redemptions, and USDe supply fell from about $15 billion in early October 2025 to about $8.5 billion a month later and about