MEGA Cuts 20% of Staff Days After $30M AI Product Pledge
MEGA, formerly the MegaETH Foundation, cut 20% of its workforce, co-founder Shuyao Kong said Nov. 13. Departing staff covered the chain, wallet, ecosystem support and comms, days after a $30M AI inference pledge.
20% of the workforce, gone. MEGA, the renamed MegaETH Foundation, has cut a fifth of its staff, co-founder Shuyao Kong said in a Nov. 13 X post. The disclosure lands three days after the group rebranded and committed $30 million to building products on MegaETH, starting with AI inference.
Kong described a restructuring over the past few months. She did not say when the jobs were cut or how many people were affected. No breakdown by team was given.
The departing employees worked on the blockchain, wallet, ecosystem support and communications from the project's earliest days. Kong said founders, early employees and the core engineering team "remain committed to MEGA."
What MEGA is building
The foundation rebranded on Nov. 10 and pledged $30 million from its existing treasury. The announcement did not specify how much of that goes to inference. Kong cast the move as a break from a chain-only model.
"We realized that staying a chain-only company felt wrong and would have meant ignoring the biggest opportunity in front of us,"
Shuyao Kong, MEGA co-founder
Next up: a public AI inference marketplace on MegaETH in December 2026. Kong has said details on how it operates, which providers take part and which models it runs are being held until launch. A November white paper by Yilong Li and Lei Yang proposes a "Purified Intelligence" approach meant to make inference interchangeable across providers.
The new name does not replace the blockchain's. MEGA's website lists MegaETH as its blockchain division. At the rebrand, MegaETH said the network would stay general-purpose and permissionless, with builders still receiving technical support, go-to-market help and network support.
Open questions
Kong's Nov. 13 statement did not address whether ecosystem support, the December schedule or the $30M commitment would change. Nor did it say who staffs the inference business.
The gap matters. Ecosystem-support staff are among those leaving, which bears directly on the promise of continued builder support.
Context
In July, MegaETH closed its accelerator after two Mega Mafia cohorts supported roughly 20 teams that raised $80 million collectively. Kong said then that most successful supported apps were no longer being built on MegaETH, and that resources would go to first-party consumer products. Many of those teams moved to chains such as Base and Monad, or built their own.
The token launched April 30 with a fixed supply of 10 billion MEGA, 53.3% of it allocated to performance-based staking rewards, and crashed 55% on launch day. In May the foundation ran its first buyback using USDm rewards.
Kong's own read: "We have a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead." The December marketplace is the next checkpoint.
