Crypto for Muslims? Binance launches ‘Sharia Earn'
The move comes a year after it formally launched its Dubai operations with full retail and institutional services.
In a statement, Binance said this is 'a game-changing product in its mission to build a more inclusive financial future in line with Islamic principles' and is officially certified by Amanie Advisors, a Sharia advisory firm.
Emirates, Dubai Duty Free set to allow crypto payments
The product will be available to users in some 30 countries, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
CEO Richard Teng said, 'Our mission has always been to create an inclusive and transparent trading environment. With this product we're empowering the Muslim community and Sharia focused investors to participate in one of the most exciting financial revolutions of our time.'
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'This is more than a product – it's a movement toward a more principled and equitable digital economy that promotes financial freedom for all.'
Binance explained that the Islamic finance market is over $4 trillion, yet millions of Muslims have been left out of the decentralized finance movement due to the 'ambiguity around religious compliance.'
It wants Sharia Earn to address this gap by 'offering a transparent, values driven way for the global Muslim community to earn passive income in crypto.'
This is Binance's first entry into Islamic finance and a commitment to innovation that respects cultural and spiritual values.
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Launching with Binance Coin, Ether, and Solana, the platform allows users to earn yield within the parameters of a Sharia-compliant product developed in alignment with 'faith-based principles.'
Binance said that while crypto challenges traditional finance through decentralization, Islamic finance challenges it through halal guidelines – principles such as risk sharing, wealth circulation, prohibition of interest (riba) and excessive uncertainty (gharar). It stated that the product ensures that all deployed funds are channeled into ventures and assets that are halal under Islamic law.
It explained that Sharia Earn is built with underlying tech from Binance Earn's existing BNB Locked Products, and ETH Staking & SOL Staking, with the mechanics of each having been reviewed by Sharia scholars and have been deemed to be fit for our Islamic users, through the purpose fit Wakala agreement - an Islamic finance contract in which one party appoints another party to act on their behalf for a specific task or series of tasks.
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In these countries, interest payments are crowding out everything else, Recent research finds they now spend five times more on repaying creditors than on climate adaptation and resilience. In other words, money that could build hospitals or flood defence is siphoned off to foreign banks and bondholders. For instance, Pakistan, hit by devastating floods in 2022, was forced to divert billions from reconstruction to service external debt even as development benchmarks languished Tariffs and limits of coercion On the other, just as the declaration landed with a thud, US President Donald Trump, in a characteristically forceful social media post on 7 July 2025, declared, 'Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy. Thank you for your attention to this matter!' On the same day, Trump dispatched his infamous tariff letters, thinly veiled as diplomatic overtures but steeped in unilateral belligerence as the outlines of a broader geopolitical reordering became visible. The letters, which rationalised arbitrary tariff hikes under the guise of 'reciprocity,' were less about trade and more about a desperate assertion of imperial prerogative. However, beneath the surface ran the unmistakable traces of failed coercion, faltering hegemony and the paranoid anxiety that BRICS was no longer merely an acronym, but a nascent counter-power. The breakdown of negotiations over the preceding three months exposed the fraying limits of American economic statecraft. The old instruments of leverage such as sanctions, tariffs and financial blackmail appeared to have fatigue, not fear. Trump's pivot from suspension to escalation in the China tariff war revealed a strategic cul-de-sac. Plagued by its own contradictions and upsetting its own allies, the administration alienated long-time partners while inadvertently catalysing an emerging geopolitical bloc rooted in the shared experience of imperial exclusion. The BRICS summit in Brazil unfolded against this backdrop. No longer the butt of Western punditry, the bloc has matured into a platform with infrastructural and political density. Ten full members, dozens of interested observers, and over fifty states engaged in formal and informal dialogue suggest a layered institutional emergence, rather than mere rhetorical alignment. Measured by purchasing power, BRICS economies account for nearly half of global GDP and over half of the global population. Their economic trajectories increasingly set the pace for global growth. The states also command vast shares of industrial production, energy reserves, agricultural capacity and critical minerals, locating them within the core of the material reproduction processes on which global stability depends. As the financial capital in the West remains long decoupled from productive investment, BRICS economies remain anchored in physical output and strategic sectors, grounded in systemic exchange value and deriving strength from infrastructure, energy and commodities rather than speculative cycles. The key difference is that energy in these economies is not a volatile asset class, but a prerequisite for sovereign development. Russia, Iran, Brazil, the UAE and Saudi Arabia dominate fossil fuel markets, while China leads in renewables and storage technologies. These capacities form the base of coordinated state-led planning. Unlike the credit-driven economies of the North Atlantic, where returns are chased through stock buybacks and asset bubbles, BRICS states engage in long-term provisioning. Economic derangement In the United States, financialisation has advanced to the point of economic derangement. Productive sectors have been hollowed out. Industrial investment lags behind speculative flows. Shareholder returns dictate policy. Decades of offshoring and deindustrialisation have produced sharp internal polarisation: real wages stagnate, infrastructure decays, and essential services become unaffordable for large sections of the population. On the global stage, the dollar functions less as a stabilising currency than as a mechanism of control. Washington's reliance on financial warfare – via sanctions, reserve freezes, and regulatory overreach –has exposed the fragility of this model. As volatility is offloaded onto the Global South, states have begun to seek institutional and monetary alternatives. However, the desire to delink is not ideological but comes from the structural asymmetries imposed by dollar dependency. Meanwhile, Europe grapples with its own, increasingly intertwined crises. The break from Russian energy has frayed the continent's industrial core. Politically, Europe appears unmoored. It invokes strategic autonomy while subordinating security policy to NATO. It speaks the language of multilateralism while confiscating foreign assets, invoking liberal peace while escalating militarisation and even remains silent as genocide and economic exploitations wreak havoc with its leadership staggeringly beholden to the US security umbrella. However, analysts note this is not a tactical misstep but a deeper crisis of orientation, with competing imperatives pulling the project apart. The intensification of Western hostility toward BRICS must be situated within this broader geopolitical fatigue. The confrontations are not limited to foreign policy disputes but reflect a deeper structural unease. Russia's assertion of resource sovereignty, Iran's defiance of financial blackmail and China's infrastructural ascendancy all constitute affronts to a global order increasingly unable to reproduce itself on its own terms. States that refuse to act as auxiliaries are subjected to diplomatic pressure and narrative containment. The postwar liberal consensus and its unipolar afterglow are no longer capable of securing ideological consent. Inflation, ecological crisis, inequality, and institutional fragmentation are not imported shocks; they are endogenous to the prevailing model. The externalisation of blame through sanctions and military build-ups only hastens systemic fragmentation. The BRICS configuration does not emerge from vacuum. It arises from decades of structural adjustment, resource plunder and financial dependency. Its institutional evolution – through the NDB, cross-border payment systems and currency swaps – offers both protective infrastructure and a set of alternatives. Similarly, local currency trade, infrastructure investment without neoliberal conditionalities and policy coordination on energy and technology signal a concerted attempt to reclaim developmental sovereignty. Countries across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia increasingly view BRICS+ as a strategic space to exit from the permanent austerity logic of Bretton Woods institutions. China, in this configuration, operates not as an imperial centre but as a strategic fulcrum. Its approach remains focused on connectivity, logistics and planning capacity. However, it is important to steer clear of the old post-Cold War shallow binaries: the 'authoritarian countries' in the BRICS are intending a reversal of globalisation but calling for a redirection. With their emphasis on real economy coordination, development financing and institutional redundancy, they are preparing for strategic insulation, not isolation. The bloc reflects a wider historical motion: a world disenchanted with liberal finance and searching for new instruments of survival and cooperation. The South is no longer a passive recipient in a preordained order. The architecture being assembled across BRICS states is uneven, unfinished and fraught, but undeniably real. The West can interpret this shift as a threat or a mirror. However, the historical momentum no longer centres on its crises. It centres elsewhere – in the slow, stubborn accumulation of material capacity outside the imperial core.
