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Irshad Akhtar asks whether Islamic finance should now examine the monetary architecture its instruments operate within. The answer is yes, and the second phase he proposes need not begin as a blank page: the Qur'an and the classical scholars already gave a theory of money precise enough to design against.
Cash proved a payment without ever proving who you were. As money becomes an entry on somebody else's machine, the question is what an institution should be permitted to do merely because it keeps the ledger.
Mufti Taqi Usmani's fatwa asks whether a cryptocurrency token is maal, wealth. The deeper and older question, the one Islamic finance was actually built to ask, is whether money's own architecture, however it is built, honours or violates six roots that predate any single ruling.