A DePin company that has 3.5 million users and is currently raising Series A funding has 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 the key to various problems in the crypto industry.
“If DeFi really wants to go mainstream, this is the only way,” said founder and CEO David Alexander Scheer.
Scheer told CoinDesk that 2026 will be “the year the lines between TradFi and DeFi converge” while remaining grounded, saying Monday morning 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 company of CoinDesk); Augie Ilag, Head of Asia at CMT Digital; Richard Muirhead, co-founder of Fabric Ventures, and Ella Zhang, director of YZi Labs.
The other three finalists were Swiss-based tokenized real-world 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 tailored trading strategies via prompts to its AI model.
“We provide infrastructure, not strategy,” the company’s CEO said during the presentation, responding to a question about how publicized AI’s business capability is.
Florian Ehrbar, co-founder of Onchain Labs, presented Engage, a platform that enables crypto companies to offer tokenized gold solutions and answered judges’ questions 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 roll out a mainnet in the second quarter of this year.
There were eight other semi-finalists, including London-based tokenized real-world assets 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.
