What "Shariah-conscious" means here

It means that questions of Islamic finance shaped the design, and that where the engineering could avoid something widely considered problematic, it tries to. It does not mean those questions have been answered.

The most important of these choices is how staking rewards work.

FirstIslamicCoin is a proof-of-stake network. Instead of miners spending electricity, people who hold FIC keep a wallet online and take turns producing the blocks that record transactions. The protocol chooses who produces each block at random, weighted by how many coins each participant has put forward.

Whoever produces a block receives a fixed 10 FIC, plus the fees paid by the transactions in that block. This is enforced by every node on the network: a block that pays itself any other amount is rejected.

A reward for work, not a return on money held

The 10 FIC is paid for doing something: checking transactions, assembling them into a block, signing it and publishing it to the network. A participant who does not run a node and produce blocks receives nothing, however many coins they hold.

The amount does not grow with the balance

Every block pays the same 10 FIC. Someone staking 100 FIC and someone staking 100 million FIC receive exactly the same reward for each block they produce. There is no percentage, no annual rate and no figure calculated from the size of anyone's holding.

This is a deliberate change from the project FIC was built from, which paid stakers roughly 13.7% a year on the value of their coins, multiplied by how long the coins had been held. That model was removed completely because it resembled interest on a deposit.

Holding coins for longer earns nothing extra either. Coin age has no effect on the reward, or on the chance of being chosen.

A larger stake wins more often

What a larger stake does change is how often a participant is chosen. A participant who puts forward twice as many coins can expect, over time, to produce about twice as many blocks.

One way to think about this is as proportional participation in a shared undertaking: each participant contributes coins and the work of running a node, and the rewards of the undertaking are shared in proportion to what each put in — in some ways like the profit share in a mudarabah-style joint venture. Whether that comparison actually holds up is exactly the kind of question for a Shariah advisory board, not for engineers; it is offered here only to explain the intent.

Rewards are uncertain and not guaranteed

Block production is random. A participant may produce many blocks in a day or none for a long time. The network does not promise anyone any reward, at any rate, over any period. If a participant's node is offline, out of date or connected to the wrong chain, it produces nothing.

FIC's value in other currencies is not fixed either, and can fall as well as rise. Nothing about the protocol guarantees the worth of a reward.

• No developer fund or tax. No part of any reward goes to the developers or anyone else. The project this was built from had an optional donation to a developer fund; FIC removed it from the code.
• No hidden supply. The premine is recorded openly in the first block, and new coins come into existence only as the fixed per-block reward. The total at any height can be checked by anyone — see Tokenomics.
• No wrapped tokens or exchange listings at launch. The project this was built from issued wrapped versions of its coin on other blockchains and listed them on decentralised exchanges. FIC does not carry that over; any such step would be a separate, deliberate decision.

These have not been resolved and are not claimed to be. They are listed so an advisory board can see them plainly.

1. The premine. 14 billion FIC exist from the first block. Who controls them, how they are used, and how that is governed are not yet decided.
2. Whether the staking reward is permissible, given the reasoning above.
3. Custodial staking. A planned optional service would stake on users' behalf and pool rewards. Its terms would need their own review.
4. Speculation and uncertainty (gharar and maysir) in holding and trading a cryptocurrency whose price can change sharply.
5. Transaction fees, and whether their treatment raises any concern.