HONG KONG — CoinDesk concluded the Hong Kong Consensus on Thursday with more than 11,000 participants visiting booths and stages.
While the first day focused on institutional projects and the professional investor audience, the second day focused on developers. Representatives from the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana communities all spoke about the challenge of scaling their networks and the tools needed to support growing user bases.
World Liberty Financial, the crypto project linked to US President Donald Trump and his family, plans to launch an exchange platform called World Swap, which its co-founder Zak Folkman says will target cross-border transfers. World Swap will use the $1 stablecoin and charge less than traditional remittance providers, who can impose a cost of up to 10% per transaction.
The institutions-focused LayerZero blockchain will move to Cardano, and the privacy-focused Midnight mainnet will go live next month, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Global, said on stage. During a question-and-answer session, he added that Midnight would not target users who are deeply committed to privacy and likely to use ZCash and Monero.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng has defended his company against accusations that it played an outsized role in the October 10 selloff, which saw $19 billion in liquidations. If anything, macroeconomic shocks caused a broader market slowdown, he said.
The second day of Consensus also saw zkME win the Consensus PitchFest and FoundrAI win the Easy A x Consensus Hackathon.
Both events will return May 5-7, when CoinDesk hosts its flagship North American Consensus, this time in Miami.
