Is crypto mining legal in Saudi Arabia?

Crypto mining in Saudi Arabia sits in a legal grey area. There is no statute that prohibits it, no licence that permits it, and no known case of a resident being prosecuted for running a miner. The 2018 Standing Committee warning, the Ministry of Finance warning of 2019 and every official statement since talk about trading and dealing in virtual currencies, not about the hardware that produces them. So the question most people search for, "is it allowed?", has an unsatisfying answer: it is neither allowed nor forbidden in writing. Whether it is worth it is a much clearer story, and this guide covers both.

The short answer

If you are a private individual thinking about one or two machines at home: nothing in Saudi law stops you, but you will be mining at a loss in almost every realistic scenario, and you will be doing it without any regulatory protection. If you are a company thinking about an industrial farm: there is no mining licence to apply for, which means there is also no approval you can point to, and electricity, zoning and import rules written for ordinary factories would apply. Nobody has announced a licensed mining farm in the Kingdom, and the only Saudi-linked mining investment found in our research, by a private investor in 2021, was in Canada rather than at home.

That is very different from saying mining is illegal. It is not, and writing "banned" would be inaccurate. It is equally different from saying it is "legal and regulated", which implies a framework that does not exist. Our guide to crypto's legal status explains the same grey area for buying and holding coins.

What the law actually says, and does not say

The baseline document is the 12 August 2018 statement by the Standing Committee for awareness on unauthorised securities activities, chaired by the Capital Market Authority with SAMA, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Media and the Ministry of Commerce as members. It says virtual currencies "are not approved as official currencies in the kingdom and no parties or individuals are licensed for such practices by regulators". It cites regulatory, security and market risks, fictitious contracts and transfers to unknown parties. It does not mention mining, and it states no penalty for individuals.

Three other points matter. First, the Library of Congress review published in January 2025 found that Saudi Arabia "has not enacted specific legislation governing cryptocurrencies" and that ownership is not explicitly banned. Second, a Saudi law-firm analysis in February 2026 described cross-border crypto activity as a regulatory grey area with no retail licensing regime. Third, our research found no Saudi Electricity Company tariff rule, circular or disconnection policy aimed at miners. Residential consumption rules apply to a miner exactly as they apply to a water heater: you pay the tariff on your bill.

The Aramco story, and why it keeps coming back

In 2021 reports spread that Saudi Aramco would mine Bitcoin using flared natural gas, the kind of cheap stranded energy that miners in Texas and Oman have used. Aramco publicly dismissed the story as "completely false and inaccurate", and nothing has been announced since. The rumour refuses to die because the logic is appealing: the Kingdom has abundant energy, and mining converts energy into a globally sellable asset. Appealing logic is not a project, though. As far as any public source shows, neither Aramco nor the Public Investment Fund mines or holds Bitcoin.

This matters for your safety more than for your curiosity. Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups regularly advertise an "Aramco mining pool", a "Saudi government hashrate share" or a token "backed by Aramco mining". These are scams, full stop. The Ministry of Finance warned as far back as 2019 that using the Kingdom's name, currency or emblem to market tokens would be subject to legal action, and our scams guide lists the current variants.

The economics: hashrate, difficulty, heat

Mining is a competition. Every ten minutes or so the Bitcoin network pays a block reward to whichever miner finds a valid hash first, and your chance of winning is your share of the world's total computing power, the hashrateHashrateThe total number of hash calculations per second performed by all miners on a network. The higher the global hashrate, the smaller any one machine's share of the rewards.. Because the network automatically raises its difficultyMining difficultyA parameter the Bitcoin network adjusts about every two weeks so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes regardless of how many miners join. More miners means higher difficulty and a smaller reward per machine. whenever more machines join, a single ASICASICApplication-Specific Integrated Circuit: a machine built to do one job, in this case Bitcoin's SHA-256 hashing, far faster and more efficiently than any PC or graphics card. earns a sliver of a sliver. The halvingHalvingA rule in Bitcoin's code that cuts the block reward in half roughly every four years. Each halving reduces mining income per machine unless the price rises to compensate. cuts that reward in half every four years, so income per machine trends down unless the price rises enough to compensate.

Three costs decide whether you are profitable, and you control none of the first two. The first is the hardware price, which tracks Bitcoin's price upward just when enthusiasm peaks. The second is electricity, which runs 24 hours a day and dominates the lifetime cost of an ASIC. The third is cooling. A modern ASIC turns essentially all of its power draw into heat; put one in a Riyadh apartment in August and your air conditioner must remove that heat on top of a 45-degree outdoor temperature, so you pay for the same electricity twice. We have not published Saudi tariff figures here because we could not verify a current residential rate against an official source; read your own bill and use the per-kilowatt-hour price you actually pay.

Importing the machine adds its own line. Saudi Arabia charges 15% VAT on imports, and customs duty depends on how the goods are classified; ZATCA has no crypto-specific guidance, so a mining rig is simply computing equipment at the border. Budget the VAT as a hard cost and ask the courier for the duty before you order.

Home mining in the Kingdom: an honest assessment

The scenario people imagine is a quiet box in the spare room paying the rent in Bitcoin. The reality is a machine as loud as a vacuum cleaner that heats the room, trips the breaker on a shared circuit, and earns a fraction of a dollar a day after the pool fee, because it is competing with warehouses that buy electricity at wholesale prices. Even in countries with cheap residential power, home mining of Bitcoin stopped making sense years ago. In a hot climate with a single machine, the numbers are worse.

Mining smaller proof-of-work coins with a graphics card is sometimes pitched as the alternative. The same logic applies at a smaller scale, with the added problem that many of those coins are thinly traded and hard to sell for riyals, since SAR P2P markets concentrate on USDT and a handful of majors. If you simply want exposure to Bitcoin's price, the direct route is cheaper and reversible.

Cloud mining and "mining apps"

Because real mining is out of reach for most individuals, two substitutes get marketed heavily in Arabic and English. The first is cloud miningCloud miningA service that sells you a share of hashrate in a remote data centre and pays you a share of what it mines. Legitimate versions exist, but the sector is dominated by schemes that own no hardware and pay early customers with later customers' deposits.: you pay in USDT for a "contract" and the site pays a daily return. A handful of large operators do run real hardware, but the category is dominated by schemes that own nothing, pay out of new deposits, and freeze withdrawals once sign-ups slow down. The tell is a fixed daily yield. Real mining income moves with the Bitcoin price, the difficulty and energy costs; it is never a flat percentage.

The second is the "mining app". Pi Network, Bee Network and their imitators let you tap a button once a day and watch a balance grow. This is not mining in any energy sense: no puzzle is solved, no blockchain is secured by your phone, and the number on screen lives on the company's servers. Pi did launch an Open Mainnet on 20 February 2025 and its token trades on several exchanges, including on CEX.IO as an IOUIOULiterally 'I owe you': an exchange-internal token that tracks a coin's price but cannot be withdrawn to the coin's own blockchain until the exchange enables it., so the app has produced something sellable for some users. Bee has not; it is not listed anywhere, and any "sell your Bee" offer is a scam. Our Pi Coin guide explains the KYC and withdrawal pipeline in detail.

The halal question, respectfully

Scholars differ on cryptocurrency as a whole, and this page does not issue a ruling. Within that debate, some scholars treat mining rewards more favourably than price speculation, on the reasoning that the miner performs a real service, validating transactions and securing the network, and is paid for that work rather than betting on price moves. On that view the question shifts to whether the asset received is itself permissible, which is where Saudi voices diverge: Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manea of the Council of Senior Scholars said in 2018 that Bitcoin involves elements of usury and gambling, while scholars such as Mufti Faraz Adam of Amanah Advisors treat Bitcoin as permissible property. Other scholars note that the electricity consumed and the speculative character of the reward's value weigh against it.

Cloud-mining "contracts" with a promised return are a separate matter: a fixed yield on money handed to a third party looks, to some Islamic-finance commentators, like a loan with interest or a gamble on an opaque enterprise. Our halal guide sets out the conditions scholars commonly cite, with attribution.

Mining vs buying: which actually fits a Saudi resident?

For almost everyone reading this, buying beats mining. The table below is not a sales pitch; it is what the two routes look like once you count the costs that the mining brochures leave out.

If you want Bitcoin, buy a modest amount, move it to a wallet you control, and accept that its riyal value can fall as well as rise. If you are drawn to mining because you like the technology, the cheaper way to learn is to run a Bitcoin node, which validates the network without competing for rewards and uses about as much power as a laptop. And if you are a company with access to industrial power, speak to a Saudi lawyer before buying containers of hardware: the absence of a rule is not the same as permission.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and references

1. Saudi Central Bank — Standing Committee warning on virtual currencies (12 Aug 2018)
2. Gulf News — Saudi Aramco dismisses reports of Bitcoin mining (2021)
3. Kuwait Times — Ministry of Interior crackdown on crypto mining (2025)
4. Library of Congress — Regulation of cryptocurrencies in the GCC (Jan 2025)
5. Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) — VAT and customs
6. Mondaq / Zamakhchary & Co — Crypto platforms and fiat rails in Saudi Arabia (Feb 2026)
7. Pi Network — official site ("Mining Pi is free")
8. CEX.IO — Buy Bitcoin

Related pages

• Is crypto legal?What SAMA and the CMA actually say
• Buy BitcoinStep by step with riyals
• Tax and ZakatNo income tax — but what about Zakat?
• ScamsCommon fraud patterns and how to stay safe
• Pi CoinPrice in SAR, KYC and what IOU means