A Question — The One Nobody in the Room Asked
There's a conversation that happens a lot in the crypto space. You're looking at a product — a yield-bearing vault, a tokenised asset, an instrument promising returns — and the numbers are good. The mechanism is clean. The smart contract is auditable. Everything checks out from where you're standing.
And then someone like me has to ask a quieter question.
I won't pretend it always comes naturally or comfortably. There was a moment, in the early days with Theo, where I found myself in a conversation with a colleague — a fellow Muslim, working in product — wrestling with exactly this. I don't remember the specifics. But I remember the feeling: a knot somewhere between the stomach and the chest, the kind you get when something isn't quite settled. We spoke. And the insight I walked away with wasn't a ruling or a framework. It was something simpler: do what is within your control, and leave the rest to His will.
I've thought about that line a lot since.
A Foundation — What Blockchain Actually Is
Let me be clear upfront, because this essay will be read in good faith by some and as provocation by others: this is not a fatwa. I am not a scholar. I have no authority to issue one, and I wouldn't want to.
What I do have is a perspective shaped by close to five years of living inside this space — watching it closely, building within it, making money from it, losing conviction in parts of it, and returning anyway.
The distinction I've had to make, and keep making, is between the foundation and what gets built on top of it.
Blockchain as infrastructure — the base layer — is, in my view, permissible. It is transparent, immutable, and permissionless. Those three properties don't carry moral weight on their own. A knife is a knife. What matters is what you build with it, and who. Traditional finance is built with riba structurally in mind. Not incidentally — load-bearingly. Blockchain isn't. The base layer is neutral. What gets deployed on top is where the discernment begins.
A Ledger — Where the Rhyme Holds
Here's what I genuinely believe: crypto, at its structural best, rhymes with Islamic finance in ways most people in either world haven't sat with long enough.
Take liquidity pools. When you provide liquidity, you deposit two assets and receive a proportional share of the trading fees generated by the pool. There's no guaranteed return — if trades don't happen, you don't earn. Impermanent loss is real; if prices diverge, you bear it. The AMM governs distribution automatically, with no intermediary extracting rent between you and the outcome. That's Musharakah — genuine participatory risk-sharing where returns flow from actual economic activity, not from lending money at a margin.
Lending markets go further. On protocols like Aave, every loan is overcollateralised — you post more than you borrow. The interest rate isn't a banker's decision; it's set algorithmically by real utilisation, the ratio of what's borrowed to what's available in the pool. The asset-backing, the transparent rate mechanism, the auditable flows — this is the architecture that Ijarah and Tawarruq try to replicate in Islamic finance: financing grounded in real assets and real transactions, not in the arbitrary extension of credit. In TradFi, none of this is visible. Here, it's all in the contract.
Yield vaults carry a similar logic. When you deposit into a vault, your capital is pooled collectively. The smart contract deploys it across strategies; returns and losses flow back proportionally. You're not a customer buying a product — you're a participant in a shared pool, exposed to the same outcomes as everyone else. That collective structure, shared risk, proportional distribution — it echoes the mutual guarantee principle of Takaful.
None of this is a certification. I'm not saying these instruments are halal by default. What I am saying is that the architecture allows for evaluation in a way TradFi structurally doesn't.
I'll be honest: I don't audit every contract I interact with. Most times I don't. But I have — when something didn't sit right, when there was a nagging doubt about where the yield was actually coming from. Liquid staking derivatives are a clean example. The mechanism is fully legible onchain — ETH staking rewards, validator participation, distribution — all auditable to a point. But follow it downstream and you quickly exit the ledger. The validators are often institutional operators whose underlying business practices, funding sources, and operations are entirely offchain. The smart contract is clean. What it points to isn't necessarily.
That's not crypto's failure. It's just the limit of where the ledger ends and the world begins.
A Dissonance — The Part That Doesn't Rhyme
The culture is harder to reconcile than the architecture.
I never understood the memeification of money. Not morally, not intellectually. Tokens with no underlying value except the vibes and collective belief of a community — I watched people I know trade them, some walking away with real money, and felt a kind of quiet bafflement.
Though I should be honest. There was a flicker of FOMO before the bafflement. There usually is.
And I'll go further: I was in one. Early — two days after the token deployed. I understood the mechanics. I took profit along the way. By the time I exited, I was up roughly 50x on what I put in.
I'm grateful for that. I'm still not sure I'd do it again.
That ambivalence is the actual texture of this dilemma. Not clean conviction on one side, not reckless abandon on the other. A trade I'm glad I made and uncertain about in the same breath — which is, if I'm being honest, the most accurate accounting I can give.
Gharar, at its heart, is uncertainty sold as certainty. Meme coins are gharar made into a product. The vibes are the yield. That's not a principled foundation. It's also not always avoidable if you're genuinely in the room. The space is full of finite players — people playing for the exit. That's not a judgment; it's just how incentive structures work when money is on the table. The infinite game is harder to stay oriented to when the finite game is paying out.
A Position — What I'm Here For
When I first entered this space, it was with something I'd now call Fard Kifayah in mind — though I might not have used that word then.
A collective obligation: if enough from a community fulfil it, the rest are absolved. I'd been aware of crypto since 2014, watching from a distance. But when I looked at who was actually building inside it in 2021, I couldn't see Muslim voices from the outside — not in the coverage, not in the public discourse. Whether they were there and simply not visible, or genuinely few, I couldn't tell. What I knew was that the representation wasn't there. And that felt like a gap worth stepping into.
I'm not a reformer. Not exactly a bridge-builder either. More like — a witness. Present so the community doesn't navigate this entirely blind.
What building with integrity looks like, for me, is less a set of rules and more a posture. Examine what's legible. Work from there. Act within your control. Leave the rest. It's moderation — not the comfortable kind that keeps you at safe distance, but the harder kind that means staying in a space full of finite players and choosing, imperfectly, to play the longer game.
I would love to see a world where scholars and builders sit at the same table to discuss the future of ethical finance. But that's a longer arc. For now, I do what's within reach.
A Vessel — Not a Verdict
I'm not a scholar. Not a preacher. Just someone trying to do what's within his control.
This is for a younger version of me — curious, a little reckless, stepping into a space with no Muslim to look to for how to navigate it. And maybe for a young Muslim standing at that threshold now: the pitfalls are real. The vibes can pull you in before the theology catches up. Know what you're stepping into. Know what you can audit and what you can't. The right to verify is not nothing.
For the non-Muslim builder: in a globalised industry, the lenses your colleagues carry matter. Not for deference — just for knowing. As Surah Al-Hujurat reminds us, 49:13 — we were made different so that we might come to know one another. The knowing is the point.
For all my shortcomings, I seek refuge in Him.
That's it. That's all this ever was.
IN.
Previously → Building in Public, Building in Private