NEAR Protocol

Holding NEAR pays nothing; staking rewards are new NEAR paid for validation and depend on validator uptime, not a lending return.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Holding NEAR earns nothing by itself. The native return is staking: each epoch the protocol mints up to 2.5% a year of supply, about 90% of which goes to validators and the people who delegate NEAR to them, shared in proportion to stake and cut for validators whose uptime falls below 90%. Delegators keep their NEAR in a staking pool contract and can withdraw after an unstaking period of about 48 hours. The reward is variable and tied to validation work, which counts as payment for network work.

Supply rules and code are public and enforced on-chain and the original unlocks are finished, though the foundation's treasury is not reported and stake is fairly concentrated.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. NEAR's supply rules are public and enforced by the protocol: maximum inflation is a readable on-chain parameter (2.5% a year), supply was about 1.307 billion NEAR on 27 September 2026, and the nearcore software is open source with each protocol change announced in release notes and adopted only when at least 80% of stake upgrades. The 1 billion genesis allocation has finished vesting, so no large scheduled unlocks remain. Weaker points are disclosed but real.

Fully paid spot NEAR is widely available, and it can be held in one's own wallet.

This criterion asks whether the asset can be owned in a permissible way. NEAR trades spot, with full payment and delivery, on major exchanges such as Binance, and it can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet where the owner controls it and can stake it directly. A US spot fund, the Bitwise NEAR ETF, filed its final prospectus on 24 September 2026 and holds NEAR itself. Ownership therefore does not depend on derivatives or leveraged wrappers. How specific funds are structured is assessed separately under trading mechanisms.

NEAR provides open infrastructure for cross-chain payments and private AI, with no large abuse specific to it found.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is open infrastructure: cheap transactions, cross-chain swaps without manual bridging, and private AI inference that keeps users' data inside secure hardware. NEAR claims more than five years of mainnet uptime, and no major outage or large-scale fraud tied to NEAR was found in this research. Privacy features (the Confidential Mode of NEAR Intents and private inference) protect users but could also be misused to hide flows; no case of that was found.