Is Ritual (RITUAL) halal? I have been farming the airdrop through their Ambassador Program. Should I stop?

This is one of the more nuanced questions we have received because Ritual presents a genuinely split compliance picture that depends entirely on what specific activities you are doing within the ecosystem.

Let us start with what Ritual actually is. It is building an AI-native Layer 1 blockchain where large language models, machine learning inference, and HTTP calls to real-world data can be executed directly from smart contracts in a single transaction. The technical ambition is genuine and the team credentials are exceptional, including a former Polychain Capital General Partner as co-founder and advisors who co-created the Transformer architecture underlying all modern AI.

The core infrastructure concept, providing decentralized AI compute services where node operators earn for genuine computational work, is permissible under CoinStudy's methodology. If Ritual were purely an AI compute marketplace, it would likely score in the mid to high eighties.

The concern comes from Ritual's own founding documentation. The official Ritual Foundation blog announcing the chain architecture explicitly lists three primary DeFi applications the platform enables: LLM-driven prediction markets, dynamic lending and borrowing, and basis trading. These are not third-party developers who independently chose to build prohibited applications on neutral infrastructure. These are the founding team's own stated flagship use cases for the AI-native chain.

CoinStudy has classified prediction markets as Haram across our analysis series because they constitute Maysir, zero-sum financial speculation where one participant's gain is another's loss. AI making the price predictions more sophisticated does not change the financial relationship between participants. Dynamic lending and borrowing powered by AI is still lending and borrowing at interest. The AI optimizes the risk parameters. The Riba is still present in the economic relationship between depositors and borrowers.

Our preliminary HCS assessment gives Ritual 68 out of 100, classified as Halal With Concerns. No native token exists yet so a full score cannot be assigned until tokenomics are disclosed.

Now to your specific question about whether you should stop airdrop farming. The answer depends entirely on what activities you are doing.

If you are running an Infernet node to provide genuine AI compute services, contributing to technical documentation, testing the chain's neutral infrastructure features, or participating in community governance discussions, those activities are permissible on their own merits regardless of any future airdrop.

If you are specifically interacting with prediction market applications or testing lending protocol integrations as part of the Ritual Trials or Ambassador Program tasks, those specific activities are Haram regardless of the potential future token reward.

A potential future airdrop does not make prohibited activities permissible. The same Islamic finance principle that prevents meme coin speculation from becoming halal because of a future token reward applies here.

So our guidance is: continue with Ritual's permissible infrastructure activities if you find them genuinely useful, stop any activities specifically involving prediction market or lending protocol testing, and when the token launches check CoinStudy's updated analysis to see whether the token's economic model is tied to the growth of the prohibited applications or limited to the permissible compute infrastructure.

We will publish a full updated HCS analysis when Ritual's native token launches and tokenomics are disclosed.