HONG KONG – CoinDesk held Consensus Hong Kong on Thursday with over 11,000 attendees at booths and forums.
While the first day focused on the institutional projects and professional investor audience, the second day focused on developers. Representatives from the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana communities talked about the challenge of scaling their networks and the tooling needed to support growing user bases.
World Liberty Financial, the crypto project linked to US President Donald Trump and his family, plans to launch a foreign exchange platform called World Swap, which co-founder Jack Folkman said will target cross-border transfers. World Swap will use the USD1 stablecoin and charge lower fees than traditional remittance providers, which can charge up to 10% per transaction.
Input Output Global CEO Charles Hoskinson said on stage that the institution-focused LayerZero blockchain will be ported to Cardano, and the privacy-focused Midnight mainnet will go live next month. In a question-and-answer session, he said that Midnight will not target deeply committed privacy users who may use ZCash and Monero.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng defended his company from allegations that it played a major role in the October 10 liquidation event that saw $19 billion worth of liquidations. Rather, he said, broader shocks led to broader market declines.
On Consensus Day 2, zkME also won the Consensus Pitchfest and Foundry won the Easy A x Consensus Hackathon.
Both of these events will return on May 5-7, when CoinDesk will host its flagship North American Consensus – this time in Miami.