Is Crypto Halal? MUI's Actual Fatwa Isn't a Flat Yes or No
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By June 2026, Indonesia's regulator, OJK, had approved 1,272 different crypto assets for trading (CNBC Indonesia). If someone told you "crypto is haram," which of those 1,272 did they mean? That single-sentence version is not what Indonesia's top Islamic authority, MUI (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, the Indonesian Ulema Council), actually ruled. Is crypto halal? MUI's real fatwa gives three separate answers, not one, and most coverage only repeats the shortest of them.
In November 2021, MUI's Fatwa Commission held its 7th Ijtima Ulama (a national gathering of Islamic scholars convened to agree on a shared ruling) in Jakarta. On 11 November 2021, the commission's chairman, Asrorun Niam Soleh, announced the result (Tribunnews; Hidayatullah; MUI Jatim). It was not one ruling. It was three, and each one covers a different way people actually use crypto.
If you try to use a crypto token the way you use rupiah, to pay for coffee or settle a debt, that use is haram. MUI's reasoning: it involves gharar (uncertainty so large that neither side really knows what they are getting) and dharar (real potential for harm), and it conflicts with Indonesian law, since Law No. 7 of 2011 and Bank Indonesia Regulation No. 17 of 2015 both say the rupiah is the only legal currency (Tribunnews; MUI Jatim). This part is not controversial and it is also not the whole fatwa. Almost nobody in Indonesia pays for groceries in Bitcoin anyway; the harder question is the next one.
This is the ruling people skip past. MUI also looked at crypto as sil'ah, an Arabic term for a tradeable commodity, and said that as a general default, crypto fails that test too. To count as sil'ah, an asset needs all five of these, at once:
| Sil'ah requirement | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Physical or definable form | The asset has to actually exist as something specific |
| A known, definite value | Not a number that swings wildly with speculation |
| A known quantity | How much of it there is has to be clear |
| Clear ownership rights | Someone provably owns it before selling it to you |
| Ability to be handed over | The seller can actually deliver it to the buyer |
Source: MUI Jatim, corroborated by Liputan6 and Kompas.com.
A coin that is purely speculative, with no real thing backing it and a price driven mostly by other people's bets, fails on value, ownership and deliverability all at once. That is qimar (gambling: an outcome that depends on chance rather than a real transaction), and the fatwa treats it the same as the currency case: haram.
Here is the part most "crypto is haram" headlines leave out entirely. The same fatwa's third ruling says a crypto asset that does meet all five sil'ah conditions, with a real underlying asset and a clear benefit, is permitted to trade (Liputan6; MUI Jatim). MUI never said all crypto is haram. It said most of it fails a specific, checkable test, and the door stays open for the kind that does not.
For the coins most people actually hold, Bitcoin, Ethereum and most altcoins, the honest answer is: not under this fatwa, because none of them ties its value to a specific, deliverable underlying asset the way sil'ah requires. Their price is set by supply, demand and speculation, which is exactly the gharar and qimar problem MUI flagged.
The clearest example of what would pass instead is a token backed one-to-one by something real, physical gold, for instance, where the token is a claim on an actual bar sitting in a vault. In August 2026, DSN-MUI's own vice treasurer general, Gunawan Yasni, publicly encouraged exactly this kind of development at Indonesia Blockchain Week 2026 in Jakarta: crypto assets built on real-world assets like gold or sukuk, since those can plausibly satisfy the sil'ah test that plain speculative tokens cannot (Antara News; Republika).
This is not a settled, closed subject. As of August 2026, Indonesia's own crypto exchanges are pushing MUI for a more specific fatwa. Ronald Yusuf Wijaya, Head of Sharia Expansion at Bybit Indonesia, told InvestorTrust that industry associations have held four meetings with DSN-MUI and OJK over roughly a year and a half, asking for a coin-by-coin categorization instead of one blanket ruling, since different crypto assets genuinely work in different ways (InvestorTrust). Until that more detailed guidance lands, the 2021 fatwa's three rulings above are still the actual, current standard.
Crypto regulation in Indonesia has also shifted recently, from Bappebti to OJK; if you want the practical side of what changed for the platform you trade on, see our full breakdown of that handover. Sharia screening is not unique to crypto either. Indonesia's own sharia stock indexes apply a similar business-and-ratio test to equities, and they didn't perform the way you'd expect in 2026. If you hold crypto, stocks or both, open Explore in NetWort to see everything you're tracking laid out by asset class, rather than treating "crypto" as one uniform category the way a flat halal-or-haram headline does.