Filecoin

Holding FIL pays nothing; new FIL goes to storage providers as block rewards for proven storage work, backed by their own collateral.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding FIL earns nothing. New FIL is minted as block rewards that go to storage providers who win blocks in proportion to the storage they prove they hold. Providers must lock their own FIL as pledge collateral, which can be cut if they fail, and 75% of each reward vests over 180 days. This is payment for real work (storing and proving data) with the risk of loss, not a return on a loan. The protocol has no interest-bearing function.

Clients pay storage providers for a lawful service and base fees are burned; insiders received allocations, and the Foundation's treasury is not fully disclosed.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns, and whether any of that income is impermissible. Filecoin's economy is a market for storage: clients pay providers for storing and retrieving data, and block rewards pay providers for proven storage. Network fees partly burn FIL (about 43 million FIL burnt by 27 September 2026) rather than going to a company.

Supply rules are public and enforced by the network, but the reward system is complex and a pending upgrade (FIP-0118) would change it.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Filecoin's supply rules are public in its specification: a cap of 2 billion FIL, simple minting of 330 million FIL on a six-year half-life, baseline minting of up to 770 million FIL tied to network storage, and a 300 million FIL mining reserve. Changes are made through public Filecoin Improvement Proposals and network upgrades.

FIL is used to pay for data storage, fees and provider collateral; interest-based lending to providers exists but is not the network's purpose.

This criterion looks at what the network is actually used for. Filecoin's main use is storing data: providers held about 1.54 EiB of raw storage on 27 September 2026, and FIL pays for storage deals, fees and provider collateral. Paid demand is still small: FilecoinTLDR reports that Filecoin Pay reached an annualised run-rate of about $59,000 in August 2026. Some activity around the network is impermissible: storage providers commonly finance their collateral by borrowing FIL from lending pools such as GLIF at a fixed 15% interest rate.

Fully paid spot FIL is widely available, including on Coinbase and Kraken, and can be held in one's own wallet.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. FIL trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on Binance, OKX, Bybit, Coinbase and Kraken, and it can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet where the owner holds the keys. It can also be earned directly by providing storage. Ownership therefore does not depend on derivatives or leveraged wrappers, even though derivatives dominate trading volume.

Filecoin offers open, verifiable data storage, including of public datasets and archives; no dominant misuse was found.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is an open storage market in which anyone can store data or become a provider, with cryptographic proofs that data is still held, used among other things for public datasets and archives. The harm is moderate: preparing and proving storage uses specialised hardware and energy, and the number of active providers is modest (496 on 27 September 2026). We found no evidence that Filecoin is mainly used for fraud or sanctions evasion. Speculative trading losses are counted under maysir, not again here.