DePin, which has 3.5 million users and is currently raising for its Series A, won this year’s PitchFest award at Consensus Hong Kong.
Hong Kong-based zkME Technology won a $20,000 prize after a grueling two-day event where competitors laid out their solutions as key to many problems in the cryptocurrency sector.
“If DeFi really wants to go mainstream, this is the only solution,” said founder and CEO David Alexander Scherr.
Shear 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 CoinDesk’s parent company Bullish Global); Augie Ilage, President, Asia, CMT Digital; Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead and Ella Zhang, president of YZi Labs.
The other three finalists were a Swiss-based tokenized real assets company OnchainLabsa US-based DePin company Queenbacks Based in Hong Kong Hubble Artificial Intelligence.
In second place was Hubble AI, a company that allows users to build custom trading strategies by guiding its AI model.
“We provide the infrastructure, not the strategy,” the company’s CEO said during the presentation, in response to a question about how widespread the business potential of AI is.
Florian Erbar, co-founder of Onchain Labs, demonstrated Engage, a platform that allows cryptocurrency companies to present token gold solutions and answer judges’ questions on revenue and user experience.
Peter Gliman, founder and CEO of Coinbax, explained how his company creates infrastructure and smart contracts for cryptocurrency companies and has plans to roll out a mainnet in the second quarter of this year.
There were eight other semi-finalists, including the distinguished London-based Real World Origins project They actIt is based in Barcelona BrickBased in Hong Kong Satsumi Labs, Peter X and OKcontract laboratories From Singapore and based in Malaysia Morpheus AIbased in Japan PokeSeed Based in Dubai Synax Technologies FZE.
