Is Ankr Halal?

November 30, 2021

Rakaan Kayali

Table of Contents

Ankr Quick Facts:

Launch Date: 2019

Current Developers: ankr.com

Max Supply: Hard cap of 10 Billion coins

Practical Islamic Finance Rating: Comfortable

What purpose does Ankr serve/intend to serve?

Ankr is a distributed computing platform that aims to leverage idle computing resources in data centers and edge devices. What Ankr enables is a Sharing Economy model where enterprises and consumers can monetize their spare computing capacities from their devices, on-premise servers, private cloud and even public cloud. This enables Ankr to provide computing power much closer to users at a much cheaper price.

Practical Islamic Finance concludes:

Advancing blockchain technology by making low-cost infrastructure more accessible to more people is something that PIF finds fundamentally positive.

The decentralization of applications that blockchains enable have the potential to dramatically improve the fairness and robustness of services we need in our modern lives.

ANKR’s ESG Rating

Environment

Ankr allows retail users and institutions to leverage their unused computing resources to assist live applications. This increases the efficiency of existing computing resources and lowers the need for additional resources to be developed saving the environment from the cost of these additional resources.

Social

Ankr enables developers to access low-cost decentralized computing infrastructure. It also enables computing power owners to better leverage this asset to generate revenue for themselves.

Governance

Votes are cast by ANKR token-holders on the basis of 1 ANKR per vote, and ANKR used for the vote is locked for the duration of the vote. ANKR tokens locked for voting can be used to cast votes for multiple proposals.

If a change receives enough votes, the Ankr team implements the agreed changes to the platform.

Practical Islamic Finance concludes:

ANKR has a positive ESG impact.

Comfort Rating

From Ankr’s utility, and its positive ESG rating, Practical Islamic Finance rates it as:

Uncomfortable to invest in from a Halal perspective.

Justification for our rating:

Ankr is degenerating into a tool to be used for creating yield through DeFi projects that are basically useless since there is no practical use case for them, a lot of them as we’re finding out are essentially just Ponzi schemes (investment fraud). Also, the liquid staking Ankr started to become heavily involved in which allows users to, in effect, earn a yield on their locked tokens by issuing new tokens with an equivalent value to the locked ones.

Consequently, we are uncomfortable investing in Ankr Coin from a halal perspective.