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zkME Technology wins $20,000 PitchFest prize
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zkME Technology wins $20,000 PitchFest prize
zkME Technology wins $20,000 PitchFest prize at Consensus Hong Kong
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zkME Technology wins $20,000 PitchFest prize at Consensus Hong Kong
The Hong Kong-based DePin company beat out 11 other finalists with its identity verification solution aimed at bringing DeFi to the mainstream.
By Oliver Knight|Edited by Nikhilesh De
Feb 12, 2026, 9:53 a.m.
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PitchFest winner (Consensus Hong Kong 2026)
What to know:
- ZkME Technology, which has 3.5 million users and is currently raising a Series A, pitches itself as the essential infrastructure for mainstream DeFi adoption.
- Runner-up Hubble AI offers AI-powered bespoke trading strategy building through natural language prompts, emphasizing it provides infrastructure rather than strategies.
- The judging panel included representatives from Bullish Capital Management, CMT Digital, Fabric Ventures and YZi Labs.
A DePin company that has 3.5 million users and is currently raising for 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 positioned their solutions as key for various problems in the crypto sector.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
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"If DeFi really wants to become mainstream, this is the only solution," said founder and CEO David Alexander Scheer.
Scheer told CoinDesk that 2026 is going to be "the year in which the lines between TradFi and DeFi converge" while remaining grounded, saying that 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 parent Bullish Global); Augie Ilag, CMT Digital's Head of Asia; Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead and Ella Zhang, head of YZi Labs.
The three other finalists were Switzerland-based tokenized real world asset company OnchainLabs, U.S.-based DePin firm Coinbax and Hong Kong-based Hubble AI.
In the runner-up spot was Hubble AI, a company that lets users build bespoke trading strategies via prompts to its AI model.
"We provide infrastructure, not strategy," the company's CEO said during the pitch, responding to a question about how public the AI's trading capability would be.
Onchain Labs co-founder Florian Ehrbar's pitched Engage, a platform that lets crypto firms offer tokenized gold solutions and answered questions from the judges on revenue and user experience.
Peter Glyman, founder of CEO of Coinbax, explained how his company creates the infrastructure and smart contracts for crypto firms and has plans to rollout a mainnet in Q2 of this year
There were eight other semi-finalists including London-based tokenized real world asset project 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.
Consensus Hong Kong 2026Crypto startupDePIN
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Binance's Richard Teng breaks down the ‘10/10’ nightmare that rocked crypto
Every crypto exchange saw liquidations during the Oct. 10 liquidation event, Richard Teng told the crowd at CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong.
What to know:
- Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng said the Oct. 10 crypto crash, which saw about $19 billion in liquidations, was driven by macro shocks like new U.S. tariffs on China and rare earth controls, not by Binance itself.
- Roughly 75% of liquidations occurred around 9 p.m. Eastern amid a stablecoin depegging and transfer slowdowns, but Teng said trading data show no massive withdrawals from Binance, which he said supported affected users.
- Teng argued that crypto remains tied to geopolitical and interest-rate uncertainty, yet institutional and corporate participation continues to grow even as retail demand has cooled.
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