Recently we have many financial instrument or i will call it platforms such as prediction markets, event-based contracts, and futures trading have gained attention across crypto enthusiast in our Muslim community. These systems are often promoted as tools for forecasting, hedging, or improving market efficiency. However, for Muslims, the key question is not innovation but permissibility under Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).
This post is written to raise awareness, encourage thoughtful discussion, and clearly explain why most contemporary Islamic scholars consider prediction markets and futures trading impermissible (haram), while also addressing the minority opinions circulating within parts of the Muslim online community.
What Are Prediction Markets?
Prediction markets are platforms where participants buy and sell positions on the outcome of future events. These events may include:
Elections and political outcomes
Sports results
Economic indicators
Policy or regulatory decisions
Participants profit if their prediction is correct and lose money if it is not. Well-known examples include:
Polymarket, Kalshi and other election betting platforms. Event-based crypto prediction protocols and similar systems
Although these platforms are sometimes framed as “information markets” or “forecasting tools,” their core mechanism remains financial gain or loss tied to uncertain future outcomes.
The Dominant Islamic Ruling: Impermissible (Haram)
Most contemporary scholars and Islamic finance bodies agree that traditional prediction markets are impermissible. This position is grounded in their resemblance to gambling (maysir/qimār) and their reliance on excessive uncertainty (gharar).
1. Zero-Sum Betting (Maysir) in a standard prediction market:
One participant’s gain comes directly from another participant’s loss
No tangible asset, service, or productive activity is involved
Wealth is transferred purely based on uncertain outcomes
This aligns with the classical definition of gambling in Islamic law, where profit is earned without trade, ownership, or labor.
2. Excessive Uncertainty (Gharar)
Prediction market contracts depend entirely on future events that are:
Unknown at the time of agreement outside the control of participants
Not tied to a defined deliverable
Islamic commercial law requires clarity, defined subject matter, and fairness. The uncertainty involved in these contracts exceeds what is acceptable.
3. Absence of an Underlying Asset or Ownership
Unlike investing in a company where ownership, risk, and reward are clearly established a “share” in a prediction market represents a wager on a future state of the world rather than ownership of a productive asset. This further reinforces its speculative nature.
Quranic Guidance on Gambling
Allah says in the Quran:
“They ask you about wine and gambling. Say: In them is great sin and some benefit for people, but their sin is greater than their benefit.”
Surah Al-Baqarah (2:219)
Islamic jurisprudence consistently holds that potential benefit does not justify an activity when the harm outweighs it, a principle directly applicable to gambling-related systems.
Minority Discussions and Common Misunderstandings
While the dominant ruling is prohibition, some Muslim influencers, traders, and community leads publicly argue that prediction markets and futures are not haram. These views deserve examination, especially because they influence younger audiences.
1. Shallow Engagement With Islamic Rulings
Many permissive arguments:
Focus on surface-level economic outcomes
Rely on Western financial terminology
Overlook foundational Islamic contract principles
In several cases, forecasting accuracy is confused with permissibility, without properly addressing maysir, gharar, or zero-sum wealth transfer.
2. Self-Interest and Incentive Bias
It must also be acknowledged that:
Some advocates profit directly from these platforms
Others hold tokens, partnerships, or reputational stakes
Financial success can cloud objective legal judgment
While this does not automatically question sincerity, Islamic rulings cannot be shaped by personal benefit, popularity, or market trends. Shariah is grounded in principles, not profitability.
A. Information-Only Use (Limited and Narrow)
Some scholars accept that if a forecasting mechanism is used:
Internally within an organization
Without personal financial gain
Strictly for planning or research
Then it may fall outside the definition of gambling. However, this does not apply to public, profit-driven platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi.
B. Hedging (Tahawwut) vs. Speculation
Islam distinguishes between:
Speculation: Risk-taking for profit based on uncertainty
Hedging (Tahawwut): Protection against an existing economic risk
While some theoretical discussions compare limited risk mitigation to takaful, this view:
Is not widely accepted
Requires strict cooperative structures
Does not justify open prediction markets
Our Approach and Methodology in Sihaad Community
Before taking this position, we have spent time engaging directly with users, contributors, and discussions around prediction markets, and carefully examining how these systems function in practice. This includes understanding their technical architecture, incentive design, settlement processes, and how profits and losses are realized—both on-chain and off-chain.
Our stance is not based on fear of innovation or blind rejection of new financial tools. It is based on informed analysis and sincere effort to evaluate modern systems through established Islamic principles. Where doubt exists, Islam teaches caution, deeper inquiry, and restraint—not rushing toward permissibility for convenience or personal gain.
This has always been our approach when discussing Islamic rulings on emerging technologies: understand first, assess carefully, then take a principled position, even when that position is unpopular.
A Firm Position on Futures Trading
Beyond prediction markets, futures trading presents similar—and often greater—Shariah concerns.
Most futures contracts involve:
Selling what one does not own
Deferred exchange of both payment and delivery
Profit driven primarily by price movement
These characteristics fall under:
Maysir
Gharar
Bay‘ al-ma‘dum (selling what is not owned or does not exist)
For this reason, we stand firmly against futures trading as permissible for Muslims, as it mirrors the same speculative behavior found in prediction markets.
Our Community Position
As a Muslim community engaging with finance, crypto, and emerging markets:
Ethical earning must take priority over trends and not every profitable system is permissible.
Innovation does not override clear Islamic principles.
Both prediction markets and futures trading, in their common forms, conflict with Islamic commercial ethics.
Fiinal ebuka's thoughts
Technology is neutral. Financial contracts are not.
Until prediction markets and futures systems are fundamentally redesigned to remove gambling-like structures, excessive uncertainty, and zero-sum wealth transfer, the Islamic ruling remains clear.
We encourage learning, sincere discussion, and consultation with qualified scholars but also caution against normalizing systems that contradict established Islamic principles.
For years, blockchain has promised to bank the unbanked. It’s a powerful slogan but in reality, the impact in emerging markets has been limited. Not because the need isn’t real, but because most solutions were built without fully understanding how fragile financial infrastructure really is in these regions.
In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, nearly half of the adult population remains unbanked. In some countries, like South Sudan, access to basic banking barely exists. Even for those with bank accounts, the systems they rely on are often unreliable, expensive, and slow. Network outages are normal. Settlements take days. Fees quietly eat into already thin margins. When things break, people fall back to cash—not by choice, but by necessity.
What struck me while reading ADI’s documentation is that they’re not pretending this problem is purely technical. They’re treating payments as national infrastructure—because that’s exactly what they are.
The Real Problem Isn’t Access It’s Reliability
Access to digital payments is growing across emerging markets, but growth doesn’t equal trust. Payment systems still suffer from frequent downtime, security breaches, and settlement delays that make them feel riskier than cash. When uptime isn’t guaranteed, digital money becomes a liability instead of a tool.
This is where many blockchain projects miss the point. A payment network that can’t guarantee reliability, compliance, and continuity simply won’t be adopted at scale—especially by governments, utilities, or large institutions.
ADI Chain approaches this differently.
Payments as Public Infrastructure
ADI Chain is built as an Ethereum Layer 2 using the ZKsync stack, but the architecture goes further. The key idea is flexibility at the regulatory level. Instead of forcing governments and institutions to adapt to a one-size-fits-all blockchain, ADI allows them to deploy their own Layer 3 networks with rules that match their compliance needs.
That matters. It means a government can maintain regulatory oversight without sacrificing speed or transparency. It means payment providers can operate within local laws while still benefiting from blockchain-level settlement times. And it means infrastructure can scale nationally, not just experimentally.
Because ADI runs on a decentralized network of nodes, the system remains functional even when parts of the network go down. This isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s critical for regions where outages are common and resilience is non-negotiable.
After years of working closely with communities, founders, and everyday users across Africa and emerging markets, I’ve come to one conclusion, our biggest financial challenge isn’t just inflation it’s the structure of our money itself.
A currency that can’t store value, can’t travel across borders, and can’t support business growth will always limit people, no matter how hard they work. I’ve watched brilliant entrepreneurs get trapped by fragmented currencies, high Forex barriers, and rapid devaluation that erases months of effort overnight.
"When people rush to convert their earnings into anything more stable, it’s not greed it’s survival."
Stablecoins made sense to me early on because they offered a way out of this cycle without dealing with the endless friction of traditional systems. But even then, it felt incomplete.
A dollar-backed stablecoin helps individuals, but it doesn’t fix the regional disconnect. Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia trade with each other more than ever, yet our currencies remain isolated, illiquid, and unstable.
That’s why @ADIChain_ stands out to me. It’s not just another digital asset it’s a regional anchor built with real institutions behind it, backed by trust, and engineered for speed, liquidity, and cross-border movement.
What makes ADI different, in my view, is that it’s designed for the realities of our markets. It removes the fragmentation that slows us down, gives businesses a dependable medium to transact with, and offers individuals a way to save without fearing tomorrow’s value will collapse.
With ADI, money moves instantly, affordably, and without the layers of fees and restrictions that have held people back for decades.
To me, this isn’t theory it’s a practical answer to long-standing structural problems. We’ve spent years trying to patch broken systems. ADI feels like the first real attempt to build a system that actually matches how emerging markets live, trade, and grow today..
Recently we have many financial instrument or i will call it platforms such as prediction markets, event-based contracts, and futures trading have gained attention across crypto enthusiast in our Muslim community. These systems are often promoted as tools for forecasting, hedging, or improving market efficiency. However, for Muslims, the key question is not innovation but permissibility under Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).
This post is written to raise awareness, encourage thoughtful discussion, and clearly explain why most contemporary Islamic scholars consider prediction markets and futures trading impermissible (haram), while also addressing the minority opinions circulating within parts of the Muslim online community.
What Are Prediction Markets?
Prediction markets are platforms where participants buy and sell positions on the outcome of future events. These events may include:
Elections and political outcomes
Sports results
Economic indicators
Policy or regulatory decisions
Participants profit if their prediction is correct and lose money if it is not. Well-known examples include:
Polymarket, Kalshi and other election betting platforms. Event-based crypto prediction protocols and similar systems
Although these platforms are sometimes framed as “information markets” or “forecasting tools,” their core mechanism remains financial gain or loss tied to uncertain future outcomes.
The Dominant Islamic Ruling: Impermissible (Haram)
Most contemporary scholars and Islamic finance bodies agree that traditional prediction markets are impermissible. This position is grounded in their resemblance to gambling (maysir/qimār) and their reliance on excessive uncertainty (gharar).
1. Zero-Sum Betting (Maysir) in a standard prediction market:
One participant’s gain comes directly from another participant’s loss
No tangible asset, service, or productive activity is involved
Wealth is transferred purely based on uncertain outcomes
This aligns with the classical definition of gambling in Islamic law, where profit is earned without trade, ownership, or labor.
2. Excessive Uncertainty (Gharar)
Prediction market contracts depend entirely on future events that are:
Unknown at the time of agreement outside the control of participants
Not tied to a defined deliverable
Islamic commercial law requires clarity, defined subject matter, and fairness. The uncertainty involved in these contracts exceeds what is acceptable.
3. Absence of an Underlying Asset or Ownership
Unlike investing in a company where ownership, risk, and reward are clearly established a “share” in a prediction market represents a wager on a future state of the world rather than ownership of a productive asset. This further reinforces its speculative nature.
Quranic Guidance on Gambling
Allah says in the Quran:
“They ask you about wine and gambling. Say: In them is great sin and some benefit for people, but their sin is greater than their benefit.”
Surah Al-Baqarah (2:219)
Islamic jurisprudence consistently holds that potential benefit does not justify an activity when the harm outweighs it, a principle directly applicable to gambling-related systems.
Minority Discussions and Common Misunderstandings
While the dominant ruling is prohibition, some Muslim influencers, traders, and community leads publicly argue that prediction markets and futures are not haram. These views deserve examination, especially because they influence younger audiences.
1. Shallow Engagement With Islamic Rulings
Many permissive arguments:
Focus on surface-level economic outcomes
Rely on Western financial terminology
Overlook foundational Islamic contract principles
In several cases, forecasting accuracy is confused with permissibility, without properly addressing maysir, gharar, or zero-sum wealth transfer.
2. Self-Interest and Incentive Bias
It must also be acknowledged that:
Some advocates profit directly from these platforms
Others hold tokens, partnerships, or reputational stakes
Financial success can cloud objective legal judgment
While this does not automatically question sincerity, Islamic rulings cannot be shaped by personal benefit, popularity, or market trends. Shariah is grounded in principles, not profitability.
A. Information-Only Use (Limited and Narrow)
Some scholars accept that if a forecasting mechanism is used:
Internally within an organization
Without personal financial gain
Strictly for planning or research
Then it may fall outside the definition of gambling. However, this does not apply to public, profit-driven platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi.
B. Hedging (Tahawwut) vs. Speculation
Islam distinguishes between:
Speculation: Risk-taking for profit based on uncertainty
Hedging (Tahawwut): Protection against an existing economic risk
While some theoretical discussions compare limited risk mitigation to takaful, this view:
Is not widely accepted
Requires strict cooperative structures
Does not justify open prediction markets
Our Approach and Methodology in Sihaad Community
Before taking this position, we have spent time engaging directly with users, contributors, and discussions around prediction markets, and carefully examining how these systems function in practice. This includes understanding their technical architecture, incentive design, settlement processes, and how profits and losses are realized—both on-chain and off-chain.
Our stance is not based on fear of innovation or blind rejection of new financial tools. It is based on informed analysis and sincere effort to evaluate modern systems through established Islamic principles. Where doubt exists, Islam teaches caution, deeper inquiry, and restraint—not rushing toward permissibility for convenience or personal gain.
This has always been our approach when discussing Islamic rulings on emerging technologies: understand first, assess carefully, then take a principled position, even when that position is unpopular.
A Firm Position on Futures Trading
Beyond prediction markets, futures trading presents similar—and often greater—Shariah concerns.
Most futures contracts involve:
Selling what one does not own
Deferred exchange of both payment and delivery
Profit driven primarily by price movement
These characteristics fall under:
Maysir
Gharar
Bay‘ al-ma‘dum (selling what is not owned or does not exist)
For this reason, we stand firmly against futures trading as permissible for Muslims, as it mirrors the same speculative behavior found in prediction markets.
Our Community Position
As a Muslim community engaging with finance, crypto, and emerging markets:
Ethical earning must take priority over trends and not every profitable system is permissible.
Innovation does not override clear Islamic principles.
Both prediction markets and futures trading, in their common forms, conflict with Islamic commercial ethics.
Fiinal ebuka's thoughts
Technology is neutral. Financial contracts are not.
Until prediction markets and futures systems are fundamentally redesigned to remove gambling-like structures, excessive uncertainty, and zero-sum wealth transfer, the Islamic ruling remains clear.
We encourage learning, sincere discussion, and consultation with qualified scholars but also caution against normalizing systems that contradict established Islamic principles.
For years, blockchain has promised to bank the unbanked. It’s a powerful slogan but in reality, the impact in emerging markets has been limited. Not because the need isn’t real, but because most solutions were built without fully understanding how fragile financial infrastructure really is in these regions.
In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, nearly half of the adult population remains unbanked. In some countries, like South Sudan, access to basic banking barely exists. Even for those with bank accounts, the systems they rely on are often unreliable, expensive, and slow. Network outages are normal. Settlements take days. Fees quietly eat into already thin margins. When things break, people fall back to cash—not by choice, but by necessity.
What struck me while reading ADI’s documentation is that they’re not pretending this problem is purely technical. They’re treating payments as national infrastructure—because that’s exactly what they are.
The Real Problem Isn’t Access It’s Reliability
Access to digital payments is growing across emerging markets, but growth doesn’t equal trust. Payment systems still suffer from frequent downtime, security breaches, and settlement delays that make them feel riskier than cash. When uptime isn’t guaranteed, digital money becomes a liability instead of a tool.
This is where many blockchain projects miss the point. A payment network that can’t guarantee reliability, compliance, and continuity simply won’t be adopted at scale—especially by governments, utilities, or large institutions.
ADI Chain approaches this differently.
Payments as Public Infrastructure
ADI Chain is built as an Ethereum Layer 2 using the ZKsync stack, but the architecture goes further. The key idea is flexibility at the regulatory level. Instead of forcing governments and institutions to adapt to a one-size-fits-all blockchain, ADI allows them to deploy their own Layer 3 networks with rules that match their compliance needs.
That matters. It means a government can maintain regulatory oversight without sacrificing speed or transparency. It means payment providers can operate within local laws while still benefiting from blockchain-level settlement times. And it means infrastructure can scale nationally, not just experimentally.
Because ADI runs on a decentralized network of nodes, the system remains functional even when parts of the network go down. This isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s critical for regions where outages are common and resilience is non-negotiable.
After years of working closely with communities, founders, and everyday users across Africa and emerging markets, I’ve come to one conclusion, our biggest financial challenge isn’t just inflation it’s the structure of our money itself.
A currency that can’t store value, can’t travel across borders, and can’t support business growth will always limit people, no matter how hard they work. I’ve watched brilliant entrepreneurs get trapped by fragmented currencies, high Forex barriers, and rapid devaluation that erases months of effort overnight.
"When people rush to convert their earnings into anything more stable, it’s not greed it’s survival."
Stablecoins made sense to me early on because they offered a way out of this cycle without dealing with the endless friction of traditional systems. But even then, it felt incomplete.
A dollar-backed stablecoin helps individuals, but it doesn’t fix the regional disconnect. Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia trade with each other more than ever, yet our currencies remain isolated, illiquid, and unstable.
That’s why @ADIChain_ stands out to me. It’s not just another digital asset it’s a regional anchor built with real institutions behind it, backed by trust, and engineered for speed, liquidity, and cross-border movement.
What makes ADI different, in my view, is that it’s designed for the realities of our markets. It removes the fragmentation that slows us down, gives businesses a dependable medium to transact with, and offers individuals a way to save without fearing tomorrow’s value will collapse.
With ADI, money moves instantly, affordably, and without the layers of fees and restrictions that have held people back for decades.
To me, this isn’t theory it’s a practical answer to long-standing structural problems. We’ve spent years trying to patch broken systems. ADI feels like the first real attempt to build a system that actually matches how emerging markets live, trade, and grow today..
Faster Settlement, Lower Costs, Real Impact
Traditional payment systems in emerging markets often take three to five business days to settle. ADI Chain settles transactions in seconds, operates 24/7, and does so at extremely low cost—often fractions of a cent.
For individuals, this means sending money without worrying about timing, intermediaries, or hidden fees. For businesses, it means better cash flow and fewer operational risks. For governments and utilities, it means transparent, auditable systems that actually work at scale.
This isn’t about replacing everything overnight. It’s about offering infrastructure that’s finally aligned with how modern economies function.
Stablecoins That Fit the Region
One of the most compelling aspects of ADI’s approach is its support for regulated, regionally relevant stablecoins—starting with a Dirham-backed stablecoin regulated by the UAE central bank.
In regions where local currencies are fragmented or unstable, a trusted regional unit of account can change how people save, trade, and plan. Instead of juggling dozens of illiquid currencies, users can transact in something stable, familiar, and widely accepted—without needing access to traditional foreign exchange markets.
This is where blockchain stops being theoretical and starts being practical.
Why This Feels Different
What makes ADI stand out isn’t just the technology—it’s the framing. Payments aren’t treated as an app feature or a speculative product. They’re treated as rails: foundational systems that economies depend on.
Emerging markets don’t need more experiments. They need infrastructure that works under pressure, scales with growth, and respects regulatory realities. ADI Chain feels like it was designed with those constraints in mind.
If the future of payments in emerging economies is going to change, it won’t come from abstract promises. It will come from systems that are reliable, compliant, fast, and accessible at a national level.
ADI’s vision points in that direction a different idea of payments, built for the realities of the world most people actually live in.
Faster Settlement, Lower Costs, Real Impact
Traditional payment systems in emerging markets often take three to five business days to settle. ADI Chain settles transactions in seconds, operates 24/7, and does so at extremely low cost—often fractions of a cent.
For individuals, this means sending money without worrying about timing, intermediaries, or hidden fees. For businesses, it means better cash flow and fewer operational risks. For governments and utilities, it means transparent, auditable systems that actually work at scale.
This isn’t about replacing everything overnight. It’s about offering infrastructure that’s finally aligned with how modern economies function.
Stablecoins That Fit the Region
One of the most compelling aspects of ADI’s approach is its support for regulated, regionally relevant stablecoins—starting with a Dirham-backed stablecoin regulated by the UAE central bank.
In regions where local currencies are fragmented or unstable, a trusted regional unit of account can change how people save, trade, and plan. Instead of juggling dozens of illiquid currencies, users can transact in something stable, familiar, and widely accepted—without needing access to traditional foreign exchange markets.
This is where blockchain stops being theoretical and starts being practical.
Why This Feels Different
What makes ADI stand out isn’t just the technology—it’s the framing. Payments aren’t treated as an app feature or a speculative product. They’re treated as rails: foundational systems that economies depend on.
Emerging markets don’t need more experiments. They need infrastructure that works under pressure, scales with growth, and respects regulatory realities. ADI Chain feels like it was designed with those constraints in mind.
If the future of payments in emerging economies is going to change, it won’t come from abstract promises. It will come from systems that are reliable, compliant, fast, and accessible at a national level.
ADI’s vision points in that direction a different idea of payments, built for the realities of the world most people actually live in.
Bakaka
This publication explores the intersection of crypto, artificial intelligence, the open web, and agentic networks. I write from the perspective of someone focused on infrastructure, real-world adoption, and systems that scale beyond hype. Topics range from blockchain payment rails and stablecoins to AI coordination, autonomous agents, and the networks that will power the next phase of the internet, especially in emerging markets. The goal is simple: thoughtful analysis, grounded opinions, and practical insight into where technology is actually heading.
Bakaka
This publication explores the intersection of crypto, artificial intelligence, the open web, and agentic networks. I write from the perspective of someone focused on infrastructure, real-world adoption, and systems that scale beyond hype. Topics range from blockchain payment rails and stablecoins to AI coordination, autonomous agents, and the networks that will power the next phase of the internet, especially in emerging markets. The goal is simple: thoughtful analysis, grounded opinions, and practical insight into where technology is actually heading.
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