Islamic Finance Principles Assessment
Riba — Does STON involve interest?
STON.fi's core revenue is a 0.3% swap fee split between liquidity providers and the protocol, which is not an interest-bearing mechanism. However, the staking reward structure contains an unresolved ambiguity that could resemble fixed, riba-like returns rather than purely performance-based profit-sharing. Muslim investors should treat the staking function with caution pending clearer disclosure, while the base swap/fee model itself appears free of interest.
Assessment: Moderate Riba
Score: 65.9/100
Our methodology examines 10 criteria to evaluate how well STON avoids interest-based mechanisms.
STON.fi earns income through a 0.1% protocol cut of each swap's 0.3% fee, converted into STON tokens and directed toward DAO-decided buybacks and burns [5][21][45][53]. This is a trading-fee model, not lending or interest income, and no official documentation describes the treasury as holding interest-bearing instruments. One uncorroborated third-party Medium source claims the platform offers "lending and borrowing" with "interest rates" [30], but this conflicts with official STON.fi documentation describing only swaps, liquidity pools, farming, and staking [11][19][27], and should not be treated as established fact absent verification.
STON.fi's staking lets users lock STON for GEMSTON rewards and an ARKENSTON governance NFT, funded by protocol fee revenue converted into STON [5][53]. This fee-derived funding source is favorable from a riba standpoint, since rewards trace to real trading activity rather than debt-based interest. However, one audit-adjacent source describes rewards as distributed "over a pre-set period" once tokens are locked [5], which is ambiguous: it could mean a variable, activity-linked payout schedule, or a fixed schedule resembling guaranteed interest. This ambiguity is the single clearest riba-adjacent concern in STON's design and warrants caution until clarified.
Gharar — How much uncertainty does STON involve?
STON.fi carries moderate uncertainty: the team, audits, and usage metrics are well documented, but tokenomics distribution and precise staking mechanics leave gaps. What reduces gharar is a named team and named audit firms; what increases it is incomplete disclosure of lock-up terms, reward calculation logic, and one uncorroborated claim about lending features. Overall, the uncertainty here is manageable but not negligible.
Assessment: Moderate Gharar (Material Uncertainty)
Score: 60.5/100
Our methodology examines 15 criteria including team transparency, audit quality, and governance.
STON.fi's founders are publicly named and verifiable — Vyacheslav Baranov (CEO), Stanislav Bazylevich (COO/co-founder), Mikhail Fedorov (CBO), and Andrey Fedorov (CMO) — with a traceable 2022 Dubai founding date and public professional profiles [1][9][33][41][49][56]. The protocol shows substantial real usage: 4.7 million wallets, $5.8B cumulative swap volume, and roughly 16% of TON's active wallets [16][40][60]. Contracts are described as open-source [27][50]. This level of named leadership and public metrics is well above the anonymous-team norm that typically raises gharar concerns in DeFi.
STON.fi's v2 AMM DEX underwent a full audit by Trail of Bits (January 2025), and TonTech separately reviewed the Omniston escrow contracts, with no critical issues reported in either case [2][18][26][42][50]. This is a meaningful transparency strength — the protocol is not unaudited. That said, detailed risk disclosures, exact staking lock-up ranges, and full custodial mechanics are not comprehensively documented in available sources, and the unverified third-party claim of interest-bearing lending/borrowing features, if ever confirmed, would introduce a fresh disclosure gap that investors should watch for in future documentation updates.
Maysir — Does STON involve gambling or speculation?
STON.fi is not designed as a gambling instrument; it is a functioning DEX with real swap, liquidity, and staking utility. Speculative trading of STON on secondary markets can occur, as with any liquid token, but this reflects market behavior rather than the protocol's own design. The underlying mechanism is productive exchange infrastructure, not a wagering system.
Assessment: Moderate Maysir (High Risk)
Score: 64/100
Our methodology examines 11 criteria to determine whether STON is a gambling instrument or a genuine economic tool.
STON.fi facilitates token swaps and liquidity provision on the TON blockchain, generating fee revenue tied directly to real trading activity rather than chance-based payouts [11][19][30][45]. With 4.7 million wallets and $5.8B in cumulative swap volume [16][40][60], the protocol demonstrates genuine economic function as exchange infrastructure. Liquidity providers earn from actual transaction flow, and governance participation through staking ties rewards to protocol performance rather than speculative odds. This productive, service-based utility is the key distinguishing feature separating STON.fi from maysir-type instruments.
Against this genuine utility, STON's secondary-market price will inevitably attract speculative trading, as happens with virtually any liquid, exchange-listed token; such third-party trading behavior does not itself alter the protocol's own design or purpose. Vesting schedules on team and investor allocations, and staking lock-ups, function as anti-speculation controls that reduce short-term churn [20][21][44][52]. On balance, STON.fi's core activity remains rooted in real swap and liquidity provision rather than a betting mechanism, so speculative secondary trading should not be read as defining the token's Shariah character.
The Full 27-Point Screening
1. Legitimacy (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Team Transparency | 82/100 | Founders are named, credentialed, and publicly identifiable via LinkedIn and company documentation. |
| Fraud & Scam Risk | 72/100 | No fraud, hack or rug-pull indicators tied to STON.fi appear in sources; audits and real usage support trust, though only moderate direct scrutiny is available. |
| Use Case Legitimacy | 85/100 | Sources document a functioning DEX with millions of wallets and billions in swap volume, indicating genuine utility rather than pure hype. |
| Ethical Practices | 78/100 | The protocol's own design is an AMM/DEX for swaps and liquidity, with no inherently haram sector targeted, aside from one uncorroborated claim of lending/interest that conflicts with official documentation. |
Summary: STON.fi has a named, traceable founding team, a functioning audited DEX product, and no fraud or regulatory action documented against it specifically.
2. Project Operations (9 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Core Protocol Business | 85/100 | The base protocol is a decentralized exchange, a permissible commercial activity, per multiple sources describing its swap/AMM function. |
| Transaction Fees | 82/100 | Fees are transparently disclosed and split between liquidity providers and protocol treasury, without interest-like extraction. |
| Treasury Assets | 65/100 | Only the DAO treasury's STON token holdings are described; full treasury composition and whether it holds any interest-bearing instruments is not detailed. |
| Revenue Model | 80/100 | Revenue comes from swap fees, not lending or interest income, per multiple corroborating sources. |
| Transparency | 78/100 | Contracts are described as open-source and audited, with public documentation and audit reports available. |
| Governance | 55/100 | A DAO governance structure exists via staking, but actual decentralization versus team/insider influence is not clearly detailed. |
| Launch Fairness | 35/100 | Token allocation data shows substantial pre-seed, investor, and team/shareholder shares with vesting, indicating an insider-weighted rather than fully fair launch. |
| Token Distribution | 42/100 | Distribution figures show large investor/team/DAO allocations relative to a comparatively small community airdrop. |
| Speculation/Utility Ratio | 62/100 | The token has documented utility (swaps, governance, staking) but heavy trading activity and speculative demand are also evident, making the balance hard to pin down precisely. |
Summary: The protocol operates as a TON-based AMM DEX with transparent swap-fee mechanics but an insider-weighted token launch and only partially decentralized governance.
3. Financial Health (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Protocol Revenue | 80/100 | Protocol revenue is generated from swap fees rather than riba-based instruments. |
| Financial Status | 55/100 | Usage metrics suggest strong market standing, but no balance-sheet stability or reserve data is provided. |
| Interest Assessment | 75/100 | Official documentation consistently describes swap/AMM/farming/staking functions with no protocol-level lending or borrowing, though one unofficial source claims otherwise. |
| Audit Quality | 85/100 | Trail of Bits audited the v2 AMM DEX (Jan 2025) and TonTech reviewed Omniston escrow contracts with no critical issues, both named and dated. |
Summary: Revenue comes from disclosed swap fees rather than interest, with named security audits (Trail of Bits, TonTech) though no detailed reserve or balance-sheet data is available.
4. Token Economics (5 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Token Purpose | 78/100 | STON is described with concrete utility functions (governance, rewards, ecosystem currency) rather than as a purely speculative meme asset. |
| Governance Rights | 72/100 | Staking STON yields an ARKENSTON governance NFT enabling DAO voting rights, as documented. |
| Rewards Distribution | 52/100 | Rewards are funded by variable fee revenue, but one source describes distribution occurring "over a pre-set period," leaving the balance between variable and schedule-fixed payout unclear. |
| Speculation Controls | 55/100 | Vesting schedules and staking lock-ups exist as partial anti-speculation measures, but their overall effectiveness against speculative trading is not established. |
| Asset Backing | 55/100 | Value is tied to protocol fee revenue and burn mechanics rather than a hard reserve asset, which is a genuine-utility backing but not fully detailed as to composition. |
Summary: STON functions as a utility token with governance and reward roles, though the precise nature of reward payouts and asset backing is only partly documented.
5. Staking Mechanism (5 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Mechanism Type | 60/100 | Staking is documented as a lock-and-earn mechanism via smart contract, but full custodial/non-custodial mechanics and exact terms are only partially described. |
| Islamic Contract Classification | 40/100 | The staking reward description ("distributed over a pre-set period") raises an unresolved question as to whether this resembles a Mudarabah-style profit share or a fixed/guaranteed return, and sources do not clarify. |
| Rewards Structure | 45/100 | Reward source is variable protocol fee revenue, but the schedule-based distribution language in the audit source creates ambiguity about whether payouts are truly performance-linked. |
| Documentation | 52/100 | Official guides mention staking exists, but comprehensive risk disclosures, lock-up specifics, and slashing terms are not detailed in the sources. |
| Shariah Alignment | 45/100 | The unresolved question of whether staking rewards are fixed-by-schedule or genuinely variable leaves a core Shariah classification question unanswered in these sources. |
Summary: A native staking mechanism exists offering governance rights and rewards, but its Islamic-contract classification remains an open question given ambiguous "pre-set period" reward language.
Overall Assessment: STON.fi presents as a legitimate, actively used DeFi protocol with real audits and identifiable leadership, but unresolved questions around token distribution fairness and the precise structure of staking rewards warrant further clarification before a definitive Shariah determination.
Written by ThanvirFounder, Ex Director S&P Global Energy
Reviewed by Imam Omar SiddiqiShariah Scholar