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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.
Feb 12, 2026, 9:53 a.m.
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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.
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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.
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Specialized AI detects 92% of real-world DeFi exploits
New research claims specialized AI dramatically outperforms general-purpose models at detecting exploited DeFi vulnerabilities.
What to know:
- A purpose-built AI security agent detected vulnerabilities in 92% of 90 exploited DeFi contracts ($96.8 million in exploit value), compared with 34% and $7.5 million for a baseline GPT-5.1-based coding agent running on the same underlying model.
- The gap came from domain-specific security methodology layered on top of the model, not differences in core AI capability, according to the report.
- The findings come as prior research from Anthropic and OpenAI shows AI agents can execute end-to-end smart contract exploits at low cost, accelerating concerns that offensive AI capabilities are scaling faster than defensive adoption.
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