On July 27, stablecoin issuer and major corporate holder of gold, Tether, announced that XAUT, its gold-backed digital token, had been certified Shariah compliant — a ruling by an Islamic fin
On July 27, stablecoin issuer and major corporate holder of gold, Tether, announced that XAUT, its gold-backed digital token, had been certified Shariah compliant — a ruling by an Islamic finance authority that the token can be owned in keeping with Islamic law.
TheStreet Roundtable spoke with several U.S. crypto investors after the announcement. The common response was why is a religious framework being attached to an investment at all?
Daniel Foster, 27, a Bitcoiner and XAUT investor based in New York, said the certification changed nothing about how he thinks about his holdings, and that he had never considered whether a token carried a religious stamp.
"Why would you certify a piece of gold with a religion?" Foster said. "I'm buying gold because it's gold. It doesn't change anything for me — I've honestly never thought about whether a token had some religious stamp on it, and I'm not going to start now."
Marcus Bell, 32, in Detroit, went a step further, questioning and calling the annoucement 'redundant.'
"Gold is gold, it's been valuable for thousands of years, and pretty much every religion and culture already treats it as real money. So why do you suddenly need a religious certificate to buy it? Faith and investing belong in two separate boxes as far as I'm concerned. I don't choose my investments based on anyone's beliefs, and I don't think this belongs on a financial product in the first place. If I want tokenized gold, I'll just buy something like Paxos and not think twice about it."
Several other Americans reiterated that a token's standing under Islamic law simply is not a variable in the decision.
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Most people in the U.S. have seen the word "halal" on a food cart or a package of chicken.
Halal simply means permissible under Islamic law; for food, that covers how an animal is slaughtered and the avoidance of pork and alcohol. Certifying that a product meets those rules is routine, and the global halal food trade runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Shariah-compliant finance is the same idea applied to money instead of meat. Just as an observant Muslim wants to know the chicken was prepared according to the rules, many want to know that a financial product was structured according to them too.
A Shariah certification on a gold token is, in that sense, the financial cousin of a halal label on food, a signal that a scholar has checked the thing against religious law so the buyer doesn't have to.
Shariah is Islamic law, and Shariah-compliant finance is the set of products built to obey it. A few hard prohibitions shape everything:
Tether's token was certified by Amanah Advisors, an Islamic finance firm led by scholar Mufti Faraz Adam, after meeting five criteria such as real ownership of physical gold, verifiable backing, no interest, no leverage or speculative derivatives, and transparent reserves.
Gold itself is widely accepted across the Muslim world.
XAUT being Shariah complaint means it does not give any interest and it is not a yield product: holders earn no rate, and the token does not lend the underlying gold out at interest. You simply hold a claim on metal that rises and falls with the gold price.
As of the first quarter of 2026, XAUT was backed by about 707,747 fine troy ounces of gold — roughly 22 metric tonnes — held to London Good Delivery standard in Swiss vaults, with a market value north of $3.3 billion.
Tether reported those reserves jumped about 36% in the quarter as investors piled into hard assets, making XAUT the largest tokenized-gold product on the market, ahead of Paxos Gold.
The company has been buying physical gold at a startling pace to back both the token and its far larger dollar stablecoin, USDT. Its Q1 2026 reserve attestation, prepared by the accounting firm BDO, put its corporate gold at roughly 132 tonnes; analysts at Jefferies estimated the hoard at about 148 tonnes worth some $23 billion by early 2026, a buying spree they said was outpacing many nation-states.
CEO Paolo Ardoino has called Tether one of the largest private holders of gold in the world and said it is on track to operate like a "gold central bank."
The scale is hard to overstate. By those estimates the stash places Tether among the top 30 gold holders on earth — ahead of the official reserves of central banks such as Greece, Qatar and Australia — with most of it stored in a high-security former Swiss nuclear bunker that Ardoino described as "a James Bond kind of place."
That is the backdrop to the certification: this is not a fringe issuer dabbling in a novelty token, but one of the most aggressive gold buyers on the planet extending its franchise to savers who need that gold in a permissible form.
Global Islamic finance holds roughly $5.5 trillion or more in assets and has been growing at double-digit rates, with about half concentrated in the Gulf states and a fifth in Southeast Asia, led by Malaysia and Indonesia.
Adi Nugroho, 34, an Indonesian Bitcoin investor and a practicing Muslim who also spoke on the condition that only a pseudonym be used, welcomed the news without hesitation.
For him, he said, the certification means he can finally hold a digital gold asset without weighing whether it clashes with his faith.
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country and one of the fastest-growing crypto markets on earth.
"I've spent a few years watching crypto chase legitimacy, so I don't call things milestones lightly, this one counts. Living in Dubai, I saw gold treated as real trust: how families hold and pass on wealth, not just a commodity you trade," said Eshna Malhotra, a 23-year-old crypto investor. "XAU₮ getting Shariah certified finally brings that on-chain without breaking the principles behind it — real bullion, no interest, no leverage. For a U.S. holder it's a gold trade and a shrug. Out here, it's a beginning."
There is a nuance the skeptics and the enthusiasts both tend to miss: Shariah compliance is not a single, settled checklist. To see why, it helps to know where the rulings come from.
The structure of religious authority widens the gap. Unlike a church with a single head whose word is final, Sunni Islam has no central body that binds every believer; a fatwa is an expert opinion a Muslim is free to follow or not, and its weight depends on the scholar's standing.
Cryptocurrency is the clearest illustration of how far that can spread. Malaysia's Shariah Advisory Council resolved in 2020 that digital assets are property and that trading them is permissible in principle on registered exchanges. Egypt's Grand Mufti, Turkey's Diyanet, Indonesia's national ulema council and the influential scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani have leaned the other way, citing excessive uncertainty (gharar) and speculation.
Tellingly, Mufti Faraz Adam — the scholar behind Tether's gold certification — sits on the more permissive side of that same divide. One asset class, opposite conclusions, all from recognized authorities.
This is less disarray than how any interpretive legal tradition behaves. Much as secular judges reading the same constitution hand down split decisions, jurists reading the same scripture can too. Standard-setting bodies such as AAOIFI in Bahrain publish common rules but openly admit they cannot force anyone to comply, so practice varies by country and by board.
Gold, crucially, sits at the easy end of that spectrum — near-universal agreement that owning it is fine — which is part of why a fully backed gold token could clear certification where a purely speculative asset might stall. So the disagreement the American holders sensed is real; it simply runs inside the tradition, not only outside it.
