Litecoin

Litecoin is a working payment network that has run since 2011, 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. Litecoin plainly works: it launched on 13 October 2011, reached block 3,185,230 on 27 September 2026 and is secured by about 2.73 PH/s of Scrypt mining power. US regulators now name LTC as a digital commodity. Among official Islamic bodies, Malaysia's Securities Commission Shariah Advisory Council (2020) treats digital currency without an underlying asset as goods ('urudh) that may be traded on registered exchanges, and Selangor (2021) allows it on conditions.

LTC is not a gambling product, but its trading is dominated by leveraged futures.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through real exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and Litecoin has a real function as a payment network with no chance-based payout of its own. The market around it is heavily speculative, though. On 27 September 2026, LTC/USDT perpetual futures turned over about $182.8 million in 24 hours on Binance and Bybit, against about $38.1 million of spot trading, so futures were about 83% of that volume (a single-day snapshot). CryptoUmmah also points to the project's recent self-description as a 'memecoin' as speculative framing.

The supply rules and code are public, but a 2026 flaw in the private MWEB layer let an attacker create coins out of nothing, and the fix needed frozen funds and a chain reorganisation.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty about what is being bought. The basics are transparent: the 84 million cap and the halving schedule are consensus rules in open-source code, and about 77.65 million LTC existed on 27 September 2026. The optional MWEB layer hides amounts, so its balance can only be checked cryptographically, and that check failed in 2026. According to the Litecoin Foundation's postmortem, in block 3,073,882 (17 March 2026) an attacker used an input worth no more than about 1.21 LTC to peg out 85,034 LTC from MWEB.

Litecoin gives cheap, open payments, but its privacy layer is treated as an anti-money-laundering risk in Korea and its 2026 exploit caused losses to third parties.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is real: a working, low-cost payment network that has run for almost 15 years without an issuer, and optional amount privacy that protects ordinary users' financial information. The harms are disputed but significant. South Korea's regulators and exchanges treat MWEB as incompatible with anti-money-laundering rules, and five major exchanges delisted LTC in 2022.