Cryptocurrency has emerged as the most promising digital asset, which serves as a medium of exchange with distributed control and highly secured financial system. This lead to an increase in stakeholders’ interest in digital currency investment. The cryptocurrencies majorly involve two phases including Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and blockchain creation. These phases have been challenged with criticisms in terms of the Islamic shariah injunctions. These criticisms are based on two fundamental issues including whether cryptocurrency is backed by asset and has a regulatory authority or not. These issues are related to uncertainty, volatility and high speculation of the cryptocurrencies. Although, several cryptocurrencies claimed to have considered the shariah requirements in their proposed cryptocurrency ecosystems. However, a strict analysis of some of the existing cryptocurrencies reveals otherwise. Therefore, this paper presents a review of some shariah-compliant cryptocurrencies focusing on their volatility and speculation. The operations of cryptocurrencies need to follow the Islamic shariah requirements. The proposed review provides an insight regarding the acclaimed shariah-compliant cryptocurrencies to assess whether they comply with the shariah requirements or not.
Blockchain provides a distributed digital ledger platform for not only cryptocurrencies but also many other distributed applications. Blockchain platforms work flow and performance are controlled by the used consensus algorithms. Although many studies evaluated cryptocurrency from the Shariah perspective, they focused only on the cryptocurrency concept and did not consider the underlying blockchain technology. However, designing a Shariah compliant application on top of a non Shariah compliant platform does not fulfil the requirements of Shariah. Therefore, it is necessary to use a Shariah compliant blockchain platform in order to produce Shariah compliant blockchain applications. To support the production of Shariah compliant blockchain applications, this study provides a comparative analysis of the most used consensus algorithms in blockchain platforms. In particular, the considered consensus algorithms are evaluated from a Shariah perspective. In conclusion, based on the conducted evaluation some of the widely used blockchain platforms (e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum) are found to be not compliant with the Shariah rules due to using a consensus algorithm that is not Shariah compliant.
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