Certification Will Drive Growth for Stellar Network with Financial Institutions in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia
San Francisco, CA. July 17, 2018 — Stellar.org, a nonprofit that promotes financial access and inclusion, today announced that it has received Sharia compliance certification for the Stellar network. The Shariyah Review Bureau (SRB), a leading international Sharia advisory agency licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain, has reviewed the properties and applications of the Stellar network and has promulgated guidance and guidelines that enable Shari’a compliant applications of Stellar technology in Islamic financial institutions.
Stellar is the first blockchain protocol to receive Sharia compliance certification in the money transfer and asset tokenization space. Additionally, the Sharia compliance certification extends to applications and usages of lumens (XLM).
Stellar.org’s founding mission is to promote global financial access and inclusion through the development of the Stellar Network, a distributed, hybrid blockchain that is fully open-source. Its infrastructure facilitates cross-asset transfers of value, including payments, and provides an instant clearing, settlement, and execution platform — enabling money to move directly between people, companies and financial institutions across borders as easily as email. By building public, open-source software, Stellar.org enables institutions to provide low-cost financial technologies and applications to serve all geographies, ethnicities, wealth levels, and religions.
Based out of Bahrain and licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain, SRB has been serving the Islamic financial markets for well over 13 years. With 35 scholars spanning 19 countries, its Sharia certification and Sharia audit services are recognized globally. SRB is widely considered as one of the world’s leading Sharia advisory organization offering banks, insurance and asset management institutions a range of Sharia certification and supervisory services across all major asset classes.
In partnership with SRB, this certification will help grow the Stellar ecosystem in regions where financial services require compliance with Islamic financing principles. For example, Islamic financial institutions in the Gulf Cooperation Council (i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE) and parts of Southeast Asia (e.g. Indonesia and Malaysia) will now be able to integrate Stellar technology in their Sharia-compliant product and service offerings.
The Stellar network’s Sharia compliance certification will help further the organization’s mission of driving global financial access and inclusion, as these regions in the Gulf and Southeast Asia are major endpoints of popular foreign worker remittance corridors. In the next few months, members of the Stellar.org will meet with Islamic financial institutions and engage them on how to best utilize Stellar in their financial services and products.
About Stellar.org
Stellar.org is a Silicon Valley based nonprofit organization that supports the Stellar network, a free, open-source network that connects diverse financial systems and lets anyone build low-cost financial services—payments, savings, loans, insurance—for their community. The Stellar network enables money and value to move directly between people, companies and financial institutions as easily as email. This interconnectivity means more access for individuals, lower costs for banks, and more revenue for businesses. For more on Stellar.org, visit www.stellar.org.
