DePin, a company that has 3.5 million users and is currently traveling to a Series A, 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 where competitors pitched their solutions as key to various problems in the crypto sector.
“If DeFi really wants to go mainstream, this is the only solution,” said founder and CEO David Alexander Scheer.
Scheer told CoinDesk that 2026 will be “the year that the lines between TradFi and DeFi converge” while remaining grounded, and said Monday morning will be “back to work.”
The competition was judged by Alasdair Foster, CEO of Bullish Capital Management (venture capital arm of CoinDesk’s parent company Bullish Global); Augie Ilag, CMT Digital’s Asia Head; Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead and Ella Zhang, head of YZi Labs.
The other three finalists were Swiss-based tokenized asset company OnchainLabs, US-based DePin firm Coinbax and Hong Kong-based Hubble AI.
In second place was Hubble AI, a company that lets users build custom trading strategies via prompts for its AI model.
“We provide infrastructure, not strategy,” the company’s CEO said during the pitch, responding to a question about how public AI’s trading capabilities would be.
Onchain Labs co-founder Florian Ehrbars pitched Engage, a platform that lets crypto companies offer tokenized gold solutions, and answered questions from the judges about revenue and user experience.
Peter Glyman, founding 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 2nd quarter of this year
There were eight other semi-finalists, including London-based tokenized real-world asset project Agant, Barcelona-based Bricken, Hong Kong-based Satsume Labs, BetterX and OKcontract Labs from Singapore, Malaysia-based Morpheus AI, Japan-based PokeSeed and Dubai-based Synnax Technologies FZCO.
