Islamic Finance Principles Assessment
Riba — Does Heima involve interest?
Heima's core protocol does not rely on interest-bearing lending or fixed-coupon instruments; its revenue comes from gas abstraction, cross-chain liquidity routing and intent-filler fees. However, its newly launched native lending product uses perpetual futures hedging to generate repayment PnL, which introduces derivative-based income streams that warrant closer inspection. On balance, riba exposure appears low at the protocol-fee level but requires caution around the lending feature specifically.
Assessment: Minor Riba
Score: 85/100
Our methodology examines 10 criteria to evaluate how well Heima avoids interest-based mechanisms.
Heima's treasury and revenue derive from gas fees, cross-chain liquidity provisioning, and intent-filler compensation tied to actual network usage — not from interest-bearing deposits or bond-like instruments. The community also voted to burn 16.5M HEI from ecosystem reserves to reduce supply overhang, a deflationary rather than yield-generating treasury action. No sources indicate the treasury holds interest-bearing fiat instruments or lends out reserves at fixed rates. The main departure from this clean picture is Heima's own lending product, discussed further below, which layers a derivatives-hedged structure atop otherwise fee-based revenue.
Collator staking rewards are variable, sourced from 30% of real network gas fees rather than a pre-set interest rate, which aligns more closely with a profit-sharing (Mudarabah/Wakalah-like) arrangement than with riba-bearing fixed returns. Rewards rise and fall with actual network activity, meaning stakers bear genuine performance risk rather than receiving guaranteed interest. Documentation on lock-up periods, slashing, and custodial status is incomplete in available sources, but nothing found describes fixed-rate staking yields, which is the key riba marker to watch for and which is absent here.
Gharar — How much uncertainty does Heima involve?
Uncertainty in Heima centers on unclear founder attribution, absent manual audits, and thin public documentation on staking mechanics, though the open-source codebase and functioning on-chain governance reduce ambiguity. The lending product's derivatives-hedging design adds a further layer of structural complexity for users to understand. Overall gharar is moderate and warrants light purification rather than outright avoidance.
Assessment: Moderate Gharar (Material Uncertainty)
Score: 58.3/100
Our methodology examines 15 criteria including team transparency, audit quality, and governance.
Named founders (Hanwen Chen, Fei Liu, Han Zhao) with a traceable history since Litentry's 2018 founding lend credibility, though RootData's listing of an additional "Kevin Cheng" founder creates minor attribution inconsistency worth noting. The project has a substantial VC backer roster (YZi Labs, Signum Capital, NGC Ventures, and others) and open-source code on GitHub, both of which support transparency. Governance is on-chain and demonstrably functional, evidenced by the executed community-voted burn proposal. This is a real infrastructure team with a multi-year track record, not an anonymous or fabricated project.
No named, dated, manual smart-contract audit of Heima's own codebase was found in available sources — only CertiK's automated Skynet scan, which flags owner-privilege and mint-function permissions alongside a moderate 60.57 code-security score. This absence of a formal third-party audit is a genuine gharar concern that should be named plainly rather than downplayed. Documentation on docs.heima.network is incomplete, with governance and staking pages often returning navigation stubs rather than full mechanics, leaving reward, lock-up, and slashing terms under-disclosed to prospective stakers.
Maysir — Does Heima involve gambling or speculation?
Heima is not designed as a gambling mechanism; it functions as chain-abstraction infrastructure with omni-account and intent-execution utility. The main speculative element to weigh is its own lending product's use of perpetual futures hedging, plus ordinary secondary-market trading with leverage on exchanges. Neither feature makes the base protocol itself a maysir instrument, though the derivatives-linked lending product deserves specific caution.
Assessment: Minor Maysir (Incidental)
Score: 70/100
Our methodology examines 11 criteria to determine whether Heima is a gambling instrument or a genuine economic tool.
Heima provides tangible infrastructure utility: TEE-secured cross-chain DEX execution, omni-accounts, intent-based transaction routing, and gas abstraction across chains. Stakers earn from real economic activity (gas fees) rather than from a zero-sum pool of speculative wagers, and governance tokens carry functioning voting rights exercised in practice. This productive, service-based utility is what separates HEI from a pure speculative or gambling-style instrument, even though its token also trades actively on exchanges.
Weighed against this utility, HEI is listed with spot, leverage, and contract markets on Binance and Bitget, and roughly 87.2M of its 100M total supply is already circulating, indicating meaningful secondary-market speculative activity exists alongside genuine usage. That third-party leveraged trading reflects market behavior around the token rather than a design flaw in the protocol itself, and does not by itself change the underlying ruling. The more relevant concern is Heima's own lending product's structural reliance on perpetual futures hedging, which merits separate scrutiny beyond ordinary exchange speculation.
The Full 27-Point Screening
1. Legitimacy (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Team Transparency | 70/100 | Litentry/Heima founders are named and traceable, with a public roster of named institutional investors, though full credential detail is limited. |
| Fraud & Scam Risk | 60/100 | No hack, fraud or rug-pull was found in these sources, but an automated scan flags only moderate code-security and owner-privilege risk factors. |
| Use Case Legitimacy | 78/100 | The protocol has clear, described real-world utility as a cross-chain abstraction and DEX-trading infrastructure layer. |
| Ethical Practices | 55/100 | The core infrastructure is sector-neutral, but Heima's own newly launched lending/perpetual-hedging feature is a proprietary product, not third-party misuse, introducing derivative exposure into its own design. |
Summary: Heima has a named founding lineage traceable to the earlier Litentry project and disclosed institutional backers, with no hack or fraud findings in the sources, though credential depth and independent verification remain limited.
2. Project Operations (9 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Core Protocol Business | 60/100 | Core business is chain-abstraction infrastructure, not an inherently prohibited sector, though the protocol's own new lending/perp-hedge feature adds a derivatives dimension. |
| Transaction Fees | 68/100 | Gas fees are distributed to stakers (30%) rather than extracted as a hidden spread, which the sources describe directly. |
| Treasury Assets | 55/100 | Treasury is known to hold DOT for Coretime purchases; sources do not confirm the presence or absence of interest-bearing instruments. |
| Revenue Model | 55/100 | Revenue comes from gas/liquidity/intent fees, but the newly described lending model captures PnL from hedged derivative positions, making the revenue character mixed rather than clearly non-interest. |
| Transparency | 78/100 | Code is open-sourced on GitHub and documentation is published, though some doc pages returned only stub content. |
| Governance | 62/100 | On-chain governance is active (a community-voted burn proposal was executed), but the collator set is still being decentralised in phases. |
| Launch Fairness | 52/100 | Launch involved a 1:1 token swap with sizeable team/treasury/investor allocations under vesting rather than a purely fair public launch. |
| Token Distribution | 62/100 | Majority of supply is allocated to community/circulated pools, with team (~22.5%) and treasury (~18%) portions vesting over time, per two partially differing but broadly consistent breakdowns. |
| Speculation/Utility Ratio | 58/100 | Genuine utility functions exist (governance, staking, cross-chain infrastructure), but the token is also actively traded with leverage/contracts, indicating notable speculative activity. |
Summary: The protocol is a genuine chain-abstraction infrastructure layer with open-source code, functioning on-chain governance, and a fee-distribution model to stakers, alongside a still-phasing decentralisation of its validator set.
3. Financial Health (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Protocol Revenue | 55/100 | Revenue sources are named (gas, liquidity, intent fees) but the exact interest-like character of the new hedged-lending revenue stream is not fully clarified in the sources. |
| Financial Status | 55/100 | The token trades on major exchanges with disclosed supply figures, but no balance-sheet or financial-stability data for the protocol itself was found. |
| Interest Assessment | 35/100 | Heima's own newly announced lending model provides USDC against collateral via a sell-and-hedge mechanism, indicating protocol-level lending/borrowing functionality rather than its complete absence. |
| Audit Quality | 25/100 | No named, dated manual smart-contract audit specific to Heima was found; only an automated CertiK scan exists, and other Halborn reports in the sources belong to unrelated projects. |
Summary: Revenue comes from gas, liquidity and intent-execution fees, but the recently introduced native lending feature using spot-sale-and-perpetual-hedging adds a derivatives dimension, and no dedicated third-party smart-contract audit for Heima was found.
4. Token Economics (5 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Token Purpose | 75/100 | HEI is documented as a functional utility/governance token underpinning gas abstraction, liquidity and governance, not a meme token. |
| Governance Rights | 75/100 | Holders exercise real on-chain governance, evidenced by an executed community vote to burn tokens. |
| Rewards Distribution | 72/100 | Staking rewards are variable, sourced from a percentage of actual network gas fees rather than a fixed payout. |
| Speculation Controls | 50/100 | Vesting schedules and a voluntary burn show some anti-speculation intent, but active leveraged/contract trading on exchanges works against this. |
| Asset Backing | 55/100 | The token's value is tied to network utility and governance rights rather than any described reserve or commodity backing, but this is only thinly documented. |
Summary: HEI functions as a real utility and governance token with variable, activity-linked staking rewards and some anti-speculation measures such as vesting and a community-approved burn, though it also sees leveraged speculative trading.
5. Staking Mechanism (5 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Mechanism Type | 55/100 | A DPoS delegation mechanism is described, but custody, lock-up and slashing terms are not detailed in the sources. |
| Islamic Contract Classification | 55/100 | Rewards are a share of real gas-fee revenue, resembling a profit-sharing rather than interest-bearing structure, but no explicit Islamic-contract classification is given in the sources. |
| Rewards Structure | 70/100 | Rewards are explicitly variable, drawn from a 30% share of actual network gas fees rather than a guaranteed fixed rate. |
| Documentation | 45/100 | Documentation portals exist and reference staking/governance guides, but the specific retrieved pages mostly returned navigational stubs rather than full staking terms. |
| Shariah Alignment | 55/100 | The activity-linked reward source reduces some gharar, but undisclosed lock-up/slashing terms and the ecosystem's broader derivative-lending feature leave open questions. |
Summary: Heima offers native DPoS staking with rewards drawn from a share of real gas-fee revenue, but lock-up, slashing and custody specifics are not clearly documented in the retrieved sources.
Overall Assessment: Heima appears to be a legitimate, utility-driven cross-chain infrastructure project with functioning governance and staking, but an unaudited contract base and a newly added derivatives-based lending feature leave open Shariah-relevant questions that the current sources cannot fully resolve.
Written by ThanvirFounder, Ex Director S&P Global Energy
Reviewed by Imam Omar SiddiqiShariah Scholar