Uniswap

Uniswap is a busy working protocol, but UNI's own use is limited to governance and the fee burn, and 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. The Uniswap protocol clearly works: it handled about $758 billion of swaps in the year to 27 September 2026 and holds about $4 billion in pools. UNI itself is not needed to trade on Uniswap; its uses are voting on a treasury of about 267 million UNI, on fees and on issuance, and, since December 2025, being burned to release protocol fees.

UNI is not a gambling token, but its trading is dominated by futures and Uniswap is a main venue for memecoin speculation.

Maysir is gambling: winning or losing by chance rather than through productive exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and UNI has no chance-based payout. The market around it is heavily speculative, though. On 27 September 2026 perpetual futures made up about 86% of UNI/USDT volume on Binance, Bybit and OKX (a single-day snapshot). Uniswap itself lets anyone list any token, so it is one of the main places where new memecoins trade; we did not find a primary or reputable measure of the memecoin share of its volume.

Protocol income is a fee for a swap service, but it is earned on trading in any token, including memecoins and interest-bearing tokens, and the mix is not published.

This criterion asks how the issuer or protocol earns. Since December 2025 the protocol takes a share of swap fees: 0.05% out of 0.30% on v2 pools, 1/4 or 1/6 of LP fees on selected v3 pools, and since 27 July 2026 fees on v4 pools on seven chains. About $15.9 million was collected in the 30 days to 27 September 2026 (DefiLlama) and all of it goes to UNI burns. A fee for exchanging tokens is in itself a permissible service fee.

Uniswap is general trading infrastructure, but a notable share of activity is memecoin speculation and trading tied to interest-based DeFi.

This criterion looks at what the asset and its protocol are actually used for. UNI is used for governance and, since December 2025, for burning against protocol fees. The Uniswap protocol is used to swap all kinds of tokens: major coins and stablecoins, which is permissible exchange, but also memecoins launched without any function and interest-bearing tokens from lending protocols. Its pools are also a building block for leveraged and lending strategies elsewhere in DeFi.

Open, non-custodial exchange infrastructure is a real benefit, but the same openness hosts scam tokens and pump-and-dump schemes.

Maslahah weighs public benefit against harm. The benefit is real: anyone can exchange tokens without handing custody to an intermediary, and the code has run at large scale since 2018 with extensive audits. The harm is also significant: because listing is permissionless, fraudulent and pump-and-dump tokens are created and traded on Uniswap pools, causing losses for retail buyers; we did not find a recent reputable measurement of their scale on Uniswap. Speculative trading losses are counted under maysir, not again here.