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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

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.

“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.”

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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.

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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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Crypto World

Crypto Exchange Bithumb to Delay IPO until after 2028: Report

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Crypto Exchange Bithumb to Delay IPO until after 2028: Report

According to the company CFO, Bithumb was “strengthen[ing] accounting policies and internal controls” ahead of its IPO plans, already delayed from 2025.

South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb is reportedly expecting its initial public offering (IPO) sometime after 2028, in another delay after restructuring and regulatory hurdles.

According to a Tuesday report from Maeil Business News Korea, a Bithumb official said that it would “focus on preparing for the listing until 2027.” CFO Jeong Sang-gyun said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that Bithumb was “strengthen[ing] accounting policies and internal controls” following an IPO advisory contract with Samjong KPMG.

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Shareholders reconfirmed CEO Lee Jae-won for a two-year appointment at the Tuesday meeting, but the delayed IPO timeline was the latest after Bithumb initially expected a 2025 listing. Under Lee, the exchange faced a six-month suspension and a $24 million fine from South Korean authorities for alleged anti-money-laundering violations.

A major South Korean exchange going public could impact local markets and crypto adoption in the country. Dunamu, the operator of crypto exchange Upbit, is reportedly planning an IPO following a share swap with Naver Financial, expected in September.

Related: South Korea tax agency seeks private crypto custodian after security lapses

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Bithumb made headlines in February after the exchange mistakenly credited many users with about 2,000 Bitcoin (BTC) instead of 2,000 South Korean won. The error briefly created internal balances totaling more than $40 billion, though most of the funds existed only on the exchange’s internal ledger and were later reversed.

Mixed signals in South Korea’s crypto policy shift

Lee Jae-myung took office as South Korea’s president in June 2025, and his political party quickly moved to introduce legislation on the issuance of payment stablecoins.

South Korean lawmakers initially proposed a tax hike on crypto gains expected to take effect in 2021. However, the measure has faced repeated delays and may be scrapped entirely, according to reports from March.

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As of March 2025, an estimated 16 million South Koreans held accounts on crypto exchanges.

Magazine: A newbie’s guide to surviving crypto winter