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The Hong Kong-based DePin institution bushed retired 11 different finalists with its individuality verification solution aimed astatine bringing DeFi to the mainstream.
Feb 12, 2026, 9:53 a.m.
A DePin institution that has 3.5 cardinal users and is presently raising for a Series A won this year's PitchFest astatine Consensus Hong Kong.
Hong Kong-based zkME Technology won the $20,000 prize aft a grueling two-day lawsuit wherever competitors positioned their solutions arsenic cardinal for assorted problems successful the crypto sector.
"If DeFi truly wants to go mainstream, this is the lone solution," said laminitis and CEO David Alexander Scheer.
Scheer told CoinDesk that 2026 is going to beryllium "the twelvemonth successful which the lines betwixt TradFi and DeFi converge" portion remaining grounded, saying that Monday greeting volition beryllium "back to work."
The contention was judged by Alasdair Foster, CEO of Bullish Capital Management (the task superior limb of CoinDesk genitor Bullish Global); Augie Ilag, CMT Digital's Head of Asia; Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead and Ella Zhang, caput of YZi Labs.
The 3 different finalists were Switzerland-based tokenized existent satellite plus institution OnchainLabs, U.S.-based DePin steadfast Coinbax and Hong Kong-based Hubble AI.
In the runner-up spot was Hubble AI, a institution that lets users physique bespoke trading strategies via prompts to its AI model.
"We supply infrastructure, not strategy," the company's CEO said during the pitch, responding to a question astir however nationalist the AI's trading capableness would be.
Onchain Labs co-founder Florian Ehrbar's pitched Engage, a level that lets crypto firms connection tokenized golden solutions and answered questions from the judges connected gross and idiosyncratic experience.
Peter Glyman, laminitis of CEO of Coinbax, explained however his institution creates the infrastructure and astute contracts for crypto firms and has plans to rollout a mainnet successful Q2 of this year
There were 8 different semi-finalists including London-based tokenized existent satellite plus task Agant, Barcelona-based Brickken, Hong Kong-based Satsume Labs, BetterX and OKcontract Labs from Singapore, Malaysian-based Morpheus AI, Japanese-based PokeSeed and Dubai-based Synnax Technologies FZCO.
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Binance's Richard Teng breaks down the ‘10/10’ nightmare that rocked crypto
Every crypto speech saw liquidations during the Oct. 10 liquidation event, Richard Teng told the assemblage astatine CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong.
What to know:
- Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng said the Oct. 10 crypto crash, which saw astir $19 cardinal successful liquidations, was driven by macro shocks similar caller U.S. tariffs connected China and uncommon world controls, not by Binance itself.
- Roughly 75% of liquidations occurred astir 9 p.m. Eastern amid a stablecoin depegging and transportation slowdowns, but Teng said trading information amusement nary monolithic withdrawals from Binance, which helium said supported affected users.
- Teng argued that crypto remains tied to geopolitical and interest-rate uncertainty, yet organization and firm information continues to turn adjacent arsenic retail request has cooled.
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