DePin, a company with 3.5 million users and currently raising Series A funding, won this year’s Consensus Hong Kong PitchFest.
Hong Kong-based zkME Technology won the $20,000 prize after a grueling two-day competition in which entrants positioned their solutions as key to solving various problems in the cryptocurrency space.
“If DeFi really wants to become 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 merge” while staying grounded, saying it will be “back to work” on Monday morning.
The competition was judged by Alasdair Foster, CEO of Bullish Capital Management (the venture capital arm of CoinDesk parent company Bullish Global); Augie Ilag, head of Asia at CMT Digital; Richard Muirhead, co-founder of Fabric Ventures and Ella Zhang, head of YZi Labs.
The other three finalists are Switzerland-based tokenized real-world asset company OnchainLabs, US-based DePin company Coinbax and Hong Kong-based Hubble AI.
The runner-up was Hubble AI, a company that allows users to build custom trading strategies through cues from its artificial intelligence model.
“We provide infrastructure, not strategy,” the company’s CEO said in a pitch in response to a question about how public the AI’s trading capabilities would be.
Onchain Labs co-founder Florian Ehrbar launched Engage, a platform that lets cryptocurrency companies offer tokenized gold solutions, and answered the judges’ questions about revenue and user experience.
Coinbax CEO founder Peter Glyman explains how his company creates infrastructure and smart contracts for cryptocurrency companies and plans to launch mainnet in the second quarter of this year
The other eight semifinalists include London-based tokenized real-world 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.
