A DePin company that has 3.5 million users and is currently raising funding for a Series A won this year’s PitchFest at Consensus Hong Kong.
Hong Kong-based zkME Technology won the $20,000 prize after a grueling two-day event in which competitors positioned their solutions as key to various problems in the cryptocurrency sector.
“If DeFi really wants to go mainstream, this is the only solution,” said founder and CEO David Alexander Scheer.
Scheer told CoinDesk that 2026 will be “the year where the lines between TradFi and DeFi converge” while staying grounded, and said that on Monday morning “we will be back to work.”
The competition was judged by Alasdair Foster, CEO of Bullish Capital Management (the venture capital arm of Bullish Global, parent of CoinDesk); Augie Ilag, Asia Director at CMT Digital; Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead and Ella Zhang, director of YZi Labs.
The other three finalists were Switzerland-based real-world tokenized asset company OnchainLabs, US-based DePin company Coinbax, and Hong Kong-based Hubble AI.
In second place was Hubble AI, a company that allows users to create personalized trading strategies through indications from its AI model.
“We provide infrastructure, not strategy,” the company’s CEO said during the speech, responding to a question about how public AI’s commercial capability would be.
Onchain Labs co-founder Florian Ehrbar presented Engage, a platform that allows crypto companies to offer tokenized gold solutions, and answered questions from the judges about revenue and user experience.
Peter Glyman, founder and CEO of Coinbax, explained how his company creates the infrastructure and smart contracts for crypto companies and plans to deploy a mainnet in the second quarter of this year.
There were eight other semi-finalists, including London-based real-world tokenized asset project Agant, Barcelona-based Brickken, Hong Kong-based Satsume Labs, Singapore-based BetterX and OKcontract Labs, Malaysia-based Morpheus AI, Japan-based PokeSeed, and Dubai-based Synnax Technologies FZCO.
