TRON

Holding TRX pays nothing, but most staking rewards are paid for voting rather than for producing blocks, and the leading liquid-staking product adds lending-style rental income.

Riba means interest or any guaranteed increase on a loan. Simply holding TRX earns nothing. Staking TRX gives network resources and voting power, and rewards come only when that power is used to vote for Super Representatives (SRs). The reward design is the issue: each block pays 8 TRX to the SR that produced it but 128 TRX to the top 127 candidates and their voters, including candidates ranked 28–127 that produce no blocks, and cumulative voting rewards are about 7.6 times block rewards.

TRON is a heavily used payment network and TRX has clear functions, 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. TRON clearly works: it processed about 950 million transactions in Q1 2026 and carries about 92.5 billion USDT, more than any other network. TRX is needed to stake for bandwidth and energy or is burned to pay fees, and it is used to vote for block producers. Malaysia's Securities Commission Shariah Advisory Council (2020) treats digital currency without an underlying asset as goods that may be traded on registered exchanges.

The protocol burns its fee revenue, but the founder-linked foundation's finances are undisclosed and the largest application built around TRX is an interest-based lending market.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns and whether any of that income is impermissible. At protocol level, fees are service payments: TRX spent on bandwidth and energy is burned, about $604 million in Q1 2026, and new TRX goes to SRs and voters. But TRX does have an issuer-like centre. The SEC complaint alleges that Justin Sun owned and controlled the Tron Foundation and effectively retained control over at least 45% of the original TRX allocation, and no current disclosure of the TRON DAO treasury or its income was found.

Supply and code are public on-chain, but control is concentrated in a few block producers and founder-linked entities, and the foundation's holdings are not disclosed.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty or hidden information in a deal. Much is transparent: supply, minting and burning are visible on-chain (about 94.97 billion TRX on 27 September 2026, with 16.9 billion burned for fees), and the node software and proposals are public on GitHub. The residual opacity is significant, though. The SEC complaint alleges that at launch Sun effectively controlled at least 45% of TRX through the Tron Foundation and Peiwo; the latest disclosure of the foundation's holding found is from 2017 (34.25%).

Most activity is stablecoin payments, but interest-based lending is a large share of DeFi and TRON has been the chain most used for illicit crypto flows.

This criterion looks at what the network is actually used for. The main use is payments: TRON is the largest network for USDT, with about 92.5 billion issued and about $1.96 trillion settled in Q1 2026, much of it cross-border transfers where fees matter. A notable share is disputed or impermissible: JustLend DAO, an interest-based lending market, held about $6.58 billion, about a quarter of TRON's $26 billion TVL, and much staked TRX is pooled through its sTRX product.

TRON makes dollar transfers cheap for many users, but it has been the leading chain for illicit crypto flows and its founder faced fraud and manipulation allegations.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is real: TRON is a low-cost rail for USDT used widely for remittances and trade, and the August 2025 fee cut was estimated to make transfers affordable for about 12 million more users. The harm is also significant. TRM Labs attributed 58% of all illicit on-chain crypto volume in 2024 to TRON, though TRON's illicit volume fell by about $6 billion from 2023 after Tether, TRON and TRM Labs formed the T3 Financial Crime Unit, which had frozen more than $450 million of illicit USDT by May 2026.