Tariq N. Khaldun

Tariq N. Khaldun approaches the stablecoin monetary layer through a framework that Western legislators did not consider when drafting the GENIUS Act: the classical and contemporary Islamic jurisprudence governing financial transactions for the world's 1.8 billion Muslims and the $3.5 trillion Islamic finance industry that serves them.

The central question is not whether stablecoins are useful. It is whether they constitute riba. The GENIUS Act mandates that payment stablecoin reserves be held in short-duration Treasury instruments and other interest-bearing assets. The issuer earns interest on those reserves. The stablecoin holder receives a dollar-pegged instrument backed by interest-bearing assets in which they have no direct claim. Whether this structure constitutes riba is a live jurisprudential question that AAOIFI, the Islamic Fiqh Academy, and leading Sharia scholars have not resolved. Gulf sovereign wealth funds managing capital under Sharia mandates are waiting for that resolution before committing to stablecoin infrastructure at institutional scale.

Khaldun writes about the question precisely, drawing on both classical sources and contemporary fatwas, with the practical orientation of someone who has spent his career structuring transactions that have to work in both the financial and the jurisprudential sense. He writes from Doha.