Internet Computer

Holding ICP pays nothing, but NNS staking rewards are paid for locking ICP and voting, and grow with the length of the lock-up, so their nature is disputed.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding ICP earns nothing. The only native return is staking in a Network Nervous System (NNS) neuron: the holder locks ICP for a dissolve delay (now up to 2 years) and votes on governance proposals, directly or by following another neuron. Each day the protocol mints new ICP from a reward pool set as a share of total supply and splits it by voting power, which is stake multiplied by a bonus for a longer lock-up (up to 3x at 2 years) and an age bonus.

ICP is a working utility token that pays for on-chain computing, but official religious bodies disagree on whether cryptocurrency is property (mal).

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. ICP has a clear function: it is converted into cycles that pay for computing and storage on a network that had 67 subnets and about 1.16 million running canisters on 27 September 2026, and it is needed to take part in network governance. Malaysia's Securities Commission Shariah Advisory Council (2020), for assets under its supervision, treats digital currency without an underlying asset as goods ('urudh) that may be traded on registered exchanges.

ICP is not a gambling token, but its trading is led by futures and its price history is extremely speculative.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and ICP has no chance-based payout of its own. The market around it is heavily speculative, though. On 27 September 2026 Binance showed about $50 million of 24-hour ICP perpetual futures volume against about $13 million of spot volume, almost four times as much (a single-day snapshot).

Users pay for computing by burning ICP, a service fee, but the DFINITY Foundation, which leads development, publishes no financial statements, so the 5% limit cannot be checked.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns, and whether any of that income is impermissible. The Internet Computer has no company that collects revenue on behalf of ICP holders. Users pay for computing, storage and bandwidth in cycles; the ICP converted into cycles is burned, and ICP transaction fees are burned too. These are service fees for a real computing service. New ICP is paid to node providers for hardware (set in XDR) and to neurons as voting rewards.

Code and governance are public, but issuance is set by NNS votes, much unminted maturity is pending, and the 2021 token distribution was opaque.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Much is transparent: the protocol code is open source, supply and staking figures are published through public APIs, and every rule change goes through an on-chain NNS vote. But the supply path is uncertain. ICP has no cap, and the NNS can change voting and node rewards; supply grew from 469.2 million at launch to about 556.9 million ICP by 27 September 2026. Neurons also held about 96 million ICP-equivalent of maturity (about 17% of supply) that becomes new ICP only when disbursed.