Recapping day 2 of Consensus Hong Kong

HONG KONG — CoinDesk wrapped up Consensus Hong Kong on Thursday with north of 11,000 attendees visiting booths and stages.

While day 1 focused on institutional projects and professional investor audiences, the second day concentrated on developers. Representatives of the Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana communities all spoke to the challenge of scaling their networks and the tooling needed to support growing user bases.

World Liberty Financial, the crypto project linked to U.S. President Donald Trump and his family, is planning to start a foreign-exchange platform called World Swap, which co-founder Zak Folkman said will target cross-border transfers. World Swap will use the USD1 stablecoin and charge less than traditional remittance providers, which can impose a cost of up to 10% per transaction.

The institution-focused LayerZero blockchain will port over to Cardano, and the privacy-focused Midnight mainnet will go live next month, Input Output Global CEO Charles Hoskinson said on stage. In a question-and-answer session, he added that Midnight would not be targeting deeply committed privacy users who might use ZCash and Monero.

Binance co-CEO Richard Teng defended his company from accusations that it played an outsize role in the Oct. 10 liquidation event, which saw $19 billion worth of liquidations. Rather, macro shocks caused a broader market downturn, he said.

Consensus day 2 also saw zkME win the Consensus PitchFest and FoundrAI win the Easy A x Consensus Hackathon.

Both of these events will return on May 5-7, when CoinDesk hosts its flagship North American Consensus — this time in Miami.