The First Halal Dollar Stablecoin Is Here — And It Is Built on Bitcoin
Muslim investors have been asking CoinStudy one question more than any other since we launched on June 1, 2026.
Which dollar stablecoin can I actually use?
It is the right question. The dollar-pegged stablecoin is the most practically important instrument in the crypto ecosystem for everyday Muslim investors. You need stable dollar value to navigate market volatility without selling your Bitcoin. You need it to participate in permissible DeFi applications that require stable collateral. You need it to conduct cross-border commerce without exposure to volatile price swings. You need it to store digital value in a form that maintains purchasing power.
For years, our answer to that question has been the same: none of them are fully halal, but some can be used as a medium of exchange with significant caution.
USDT fails because Tether holds US Treasury bills in reserve. Those T-Bills generate interest income for Tether. USDC fails for the same reason. DAI fails because it is backed by positions in interest-bearing lending protocols. Ethena's USDe fails because its delta-neutral mechanism uses perpetual futures funding rates as its yield mechanism. AUSD by Agora Finance fails because it distributes T-Bill interest income to ecosystem partners.
The fundamental problem with every dollar stablecoin until now is that maintaining a dollar peg requires holding something, and everything the conventional financial system offers that is stable enough to back a dollar peg is an interest-bearing instrument. US Treasuries pay interest. Bank deposits earn interest. Overnight repos generate interest. The entire infrastructure of conventional dollar stability is built on Riba.
In July 2026, that changed.
Introducing Ducat Protocol — Built on Bitcoin, Free From Riba
Ducat Protocol is a Bitcoin Layer 1-native credit protocol that allows Bitcoin holders to borrow dollar-pegged stablecoins against their BTC without selling, without interest, and without surrendering custody.
The stablecoin it creates is called UNIT.
UNIT is backed by one thing only: Bitcoin. Not Bitcoin earning yield in a lending protocol. Not Bitcoin wrapped in an interest-generating DeFi position. Just Bitcoin, held in non-custodial 2-of-2 Taproot vaults on Bitcoin Layer 1, overcollateralized, generating no income whatsoever.
CoinStudy has analyzed hundreds of cryptocurrencies since launching. We have reviewed every major dollar stablecoin in existence. Ducat Protocol is the first to receive a Halal classification in our preliminary HCS analysis with a preliminary score of 88 out of 100 Halal.
That number is not just a score. It is the answer to the question Muslim investors have been asking us for years.
How Ducat Works — Simply Explained
The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity.
You deposit Bitcoin into a non-custodial Taproot vault. The vault uses a 2-of-2 multisig structure where you retain one key and an 11-of-15 Guardian network holds the other. Neither party can move your BTC without the other. Your Bitcoin is genuinely yours throughout the entire process.
Once your BTC is in the vault, you borrow UNIT or USDC against it at whatever collateral ratio you choose, from conservative at 200% and above to more aggressive down to the 135% minimum. You pay a single one-time origination fee of 1% at the moment you open the vault. That is the only cost of the entire arrangement.
From that point forward you owe exactly the amount you borrowed. In one year, five years, or ten years, if you have not repaid, you still owe exactly the same amount. No interest has accrued. No compounding has occurred. No hidden charges have been added. The debt is permanently fixed at vault creation and never grows.
When you are ready, you repay your UNIT and your Bitcoin is returned to you in a single Bitcoin block. Full custody restored. Zero interest paid over the entire loan period.
This is what Rahn, the Islamic finance concept of pledge-based credit, looks like when implemented on Bitcoin Layer 1.
Why Every Other Stablecoin Fails Where Ducat Succeeds
Understanding why UNIT is unique requires understanding precisely what makes every other dollar stablecoin fail CoinStudy's screening.
USDT and USDC are the most widely used stablecoins in the world. Both are backed by US Treasury bills and cash. Those T-Bills pay interest to Tether and Circle respectively. Tether earned approximately $13 billion in profit in 2023 primarily from this interest income. The people who hold USDT and conduct transactions with it receive none of that interest. But the interest exists, it flows to the issuer, and that interest-bearing reserve structure is the source of the compliance failure.
DAI is backed by positions in DeFi lending protocols, including USDC itself, that earn interest from borrowers. Ethena's synthetic dollar earns perpetual futures funding rates. Every other stablecoin either holds interest-bearing instruments in reserve or generates yield through DeFi positions that earn interest.
UNIT holds none of these. The UNIT reserve is exclusively BTC in Taproot vaults. BTC in a Taproot vault generates zero income. Zero interest flows from UNIT's backing to anyone. The only revenue the protocol generates is the 1% origination fee charged for the genuine service of setting up the vault and minting UNIT. That is service fee income and it is entirely permissible.
This is why UNIT passes where every other dollar stablecoin fails. The solution to the halal stablecoin problem was not to make interest distribution more equitable or to obscure the interest in complex DeFi mechanics. The solution was to eliminate interest-bearing instruments from the reserve entirely and replace them with Bitcoin.
The DUCAT Token — Halal Revenue Sharing
The DUCAT governance token is the second element of the Ducat ecosystem that Muslim investors should understand.
DUCAT holders receive a share of the origination fees collected when users open vaults. CoinStudy verified this directly with CEO David Evans. The revenue being shared is origination service fee income, not interest income. When 1,000 users open vaults and collectively pay $10,000 in origination fees, DUCAT holders receive their proportional share of those fees.
Our Shariah Board Chairman Dr. Usman Quddus has confirmed the applicable principle: commission on a halal product is halal. Ducat's product is halal. The commission, which is the origination fee revenue share, is therefore halal.
This makes DUCAT the first governance token in the stablecoin category where both the underlying protocol and the token's income mechanism are fully halal under CoinStudy's framework.
The Team Behind Ducat
Ducat was co-founded by three individuals whose backgrounds give the project unusual credibility for a Bitcoin-native protocol.
David Evans, Co-Founder and CEO, has a background in fintech, built a leading crypto publisher before founding Ducat, and is an early adopter in BTCFi with a track record of execution in emerging markets. His understanding of both the commercial opportunity and the technical implementation reflects the rare combination needed to build genuinely new financial infrastructure.
Alex Forshaw, Co-Founder and CPO, brings over a decade of Wall Street experience as a long-short equity analyst and portfolio manager and four years in crypto specializing in stablecoin design and decentralized credit systems. The stablecoin design expertise is particularly relevant: UNIT's mechanism reflects deep thinking about how to maintain a dollar peg without interest-bearing reserves, which is a design challenge that conventional stablecoin architects have not seriously attempted.
Lucas Rodriguez Benitez, Co-Founder and CTO, brings eight years in blockchain development including government defense contracts and real-world asset backed stablecoin experience at END-Labs. The CTO's prior work on a real-world asset backed stablecoin means the team has direct experience with the precise technical problem they are solving.
The project is backed by Hivemind Capital, CMS Holdings, UTXO Management, and Echo, all of which have specific Bitcoin and crypto market expertise. Chainlink serves as the primary oracle partner.
CoinStudy's Partnership With Ducat Protocol
CoinStudy discovered Ducat Protocol through a community introduction in July 2026. After reviewing the protocol documentation and verifying the yield source directly with David Evans, CoinStudy became the first halal research platform to formally list and analyze Ducat.
We listed Ducat in our Halal Airdrops section, our Pre-Launch Coin Analysis, and our Staking and Vaults page before any commercial arrangement was in place, because we genuinely believe UNIT is the answer to the question our 4,500 daily Muslim investors ask us every day.
David responded generously by offering CoinStudy's community early access through a referral code and agreeing to add the following to Ducat's official website:
Halal compliance verified by CoinStudy, the leading Islamic finance research platform for crypto investors. coinstudy.co
This is the first time a Bitcoin-native stablecoin protocol has received and publicly displayed an Islamic finance compliance verification from a named research platform. It reflects what both CoinStudy and Ducat believe: that the Muslim investor community deserves to know when a genuinely halal option exists, and that building trust with that community requires transparency and scholarly backing rather than marketing claims.
CoinStudy's formal certification by Dr. Usman Quddus, PhD in Islamic Studies and Finance, and Dr. Muhammad Ayub, PhD in Islamic Finance, is in progress and will be published when complete. The formal certification will include the Chairman's direct ruling on the UNIT mechanism, the liquidation structure, and the DUCAT revenue sharing model.
How Muslim Investors Can Participate Now
The Ducat Protocol mainnet alpha is live and invite-only. Spots are limited.
CoinStudy community members can access the alpha through our dedicated listing on the CoinStudy Halal Airdrops page at coinstudy.co/halal-airdrops/ducat-airdrop. The listing includes our referral code which grants access to the closed alpha.
Here is what participation looks like in practice. You connect a Xverse or UniSat Bitcoin wallet to the Ducat alpha application at alpha.ducatprotocol.com. You deposit BTC into a non-custodial Taproot vault at any size you are comfortable with. You mint UNIT or receive USDC against your vault. You earn Quanta points daily for having an active vault. Those Quanta points convert to DUCAT tokens at the TGE in October 2026.
If you are not ready to deposit BTC in the alpha phase you can still join the Ducat Discord community through discord.gg/ducat to stay updated on the public mainnet launch timeline.
What This Means for Muslim Investors Globally
The existence of UNIT changes something fundamental for Muslim investors navigating the digital financial system.
Previously, every path through the crypto ecosystem that required dollar-pegged stability involved either accepting the interest-bearing backend of USDT or USDC with caution under the Chairman's conditional permissibility ruling, or avoiding stablecoins entirely and accepting the full volatility of holding crypto assets.
Now there is a third path. A Muslim investor can convert their Bitcoin into dollar-denominated liquidity through a mechanism with zero interest, fixed non-growing debt, and BTC-only backing. They can hold UNIT as a stable dollar instrument without any T-Bill interest accruing to any party. They can use UNIT as a medium of exchange in genuine commerce with the clearest possible permissibility, because the Chairman's concern about T-Bill interest in the backend simply does not exist in UNIT's backend.
This is not a technical improvement on existing stablecoins. It is a category-defining breakthrough for Islamic finance in the digital economy.
Our Shariah Board Chairman Dr. Usman Quddus has written about the importance of Muslim communities engaging with the digital financial revolution rather than remaining passive. He has warned that economic imprisonment comes to those who let others define the financial infrastructure they must use. UNIT is an example of what engagement looks like: a dollar-stable instrument built from the ground up to be free from Riba, verifiable on Bitcoin's blockchain, and accessible to any Muslim investor with Bitcoin holdings.
The 1.8 billion Muslims globally now have a dollar stablecoin option that CoinStudy can call Halal without reservation, caveats, or caution around the interest-bearing backend.
It is built on Bitcoin. It is free from Riba. And it is available now.
Read detail analysis and concepts here:
Is USDT Halal?
Is USD Coin Halal?
Is Bitcoin Halal?
Ducat Protocol Airdrop
Disclaimer: This analysis is based on CoinStudy's preliminary HCS review and direct verification with the Ducat Protocol founding team. Formal Shariah Board certification by Dr. Usman Quddus and Dr. Muhammad Ayub is in progress. This blog does not constitute a fatwa or financial advice. Ducat Protocol is experimental software. Participating carries financial risk including BTC price volatility that can trigger liquidation. Ducat is not available to US persons. Please consult a qualified Islamic scholar for individual guidance before using any financial product.