Reference smart contracts are the Institute’s principal open resource. The Institute publishes open-source, independently audited reference implementations for common use cases, certified in advance so that a project may proceed from a compliant foundation rather than seek to establish compliance after deployment.
The benefit is available irrespective of whether a party engages the Institute’s paid services, applies for review, or pays any fee.
The intended set
An initial set of reference implementations for the most common structures:
- Asset-backed (tokenized real asset) implementation — a token representing a claim on identifiable underlying assets.
- Murabaha (cost-plus sale) flow — a cost-plus trade structure expressed on-chain.
- Stablecoin arrangement — a value-referenced token with defined reserve and redemption arrangements.
Each will be published with its source, documentation, and independent-audit report. The library is under development.
Certified, and precisely scoped
Certification of a reference implementation certifies that code, at that version — and nothing beyond it.
- Scope and liability (wording pending subject-matter review): certification warrants that the reviewed reference implementation, at the stated version, meets the Institute’s criteria for the pattern it implements. It does not warrant a project’s integration, its interface, its deployment parameters, its price oracles, or its off-chain operations.
- Not compliance in its entirety: use of a certified reference implementation does not, of itself, render a project compliant. The components a project builds around it remain the project’s responsibility, and a determination is issued by an accredited advisory firm.
- Not without risk: audited code is not risk-free code. No reference implementation removes smart-contract, market, or operational risk.
Licence, version control, and audit
- Licence — a permissive open-source licence [to be confirmed], available for commercial and non-commercial use.
- Version control — every implementation is versioned; certification attaches to a specific version, and changes are re-audited before a new version is certified.
- Independent audit — each implementation is audited by an independent third party, and the report is published alongside the code.
The purpose of an open resource
The scarcest resource in this field is the combination of depth in Islamic jurisprudence with competence in smart-contract engineering. Publishing a compliant foundation without charge raises the standard available to the whole field, and not only to those able to commission review.