Ethereum

Holding ETH pays nothing; the protocol only rewards validators for securing the network, and those rewards float and can be lost.

Riba means interest, a guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ETH in a wallet earns nothing from the protocol. New ETH is paid only to validators, who lock their own ETH and do consensus work: proposing blocks, voting on (attesting to) blocks and taking part in sync committees. This reward is not a contracted rate: it falls as more ETH is staked, missed duties are penalised, and misbehaving validators are slashed, meaning part of their stake is burned. Validators also keep users' tips (priority fees) as payment for including transactions, while the base fee is burned.

No company issues ETH or earns from it; fees are burned or paid to validators for their work.

The revenue thresholds (below 5% from clearly impermissible sources, below 20% from disputed ones) apply to an issuer's or protocol's economics. Ethereum has no issuer: new ETH is created only as validator rewards, and the Ethereum Foundation describes itself as a steward, not the network's ruler. Under EIP-1559 the base fee of every transaction is burned and only the tip goes to the block producer, so there is no protocol treasury and no interest income; impermissible protocol revenue is effectively 0%.

Supply, code and the upgrade process are public and verifiable, though staking and client software are concentrated in a few hands.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty about what is being bought. ETH has no hard cap, but issuance follows a public formula and total supply (about 122.05 million ETH on 16 September 2026) can be checked onchain. The code is open source, upgrades go through public Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and there are no token unlocks. Concentration is the main uncertainty: Lido's pool held about 22.4% of staked ETH on 16 September 2026; at 30 June 2026 Coinbase held about 10.9% and Binance about 7.9%, and the treasury company Bitmine reports about 5.07 million staked ETH.

ETH can be bought fully paid on spot markets and held in self-custody or through funds that hold ETH.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. ETH trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on many exchanges, and holders can keep their own keys. It is on the National Bank of Kazakhstan's list of authorised unsecured digital assets, and US spot funds hold ETH directly: BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust reported $8.69 billion of net assets on 15 September 2026. Leveraged and derivative forms exist too, but they are optional, not the only way to own ETH.

Ethereum provides large-scale settlement at low energy cost; abuse such as hacks and laundering exists but does not dominate.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. Since The Merge in 2022, Ethereum's electricity use has fallen by more than 99.988%, to about 0.0026 TWh a year by CCRI estimates. It settles the largest stablecoin supply of any chain and $19.8 billion of tokenised real-world assets (RWA.xyz, 16 September 2026). Harm exists: the FBI attributed the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in February 2025 to North Korea, and mixers such as Tornado Cash have been used for laundering, although the US Treasury lifted its Tornado Cash sanctions in March 2025.