MEGA cuts 20% of staff after $30 million AI product push
MEGA has cut 20% of its workforce following months of restructuring, days after the MegaETH Foundation adopted its new name and committed $30 million to products beginning with an AI inference market.
- 20% of staff have been cut as MEGA reorganizes its teams and brings in new capabilities.
- Founders, early employees and the core engineering team remain committed, co-founder Shuyao Kong said.
- A December AI inference launch follows earlier plans to build more products within the team.
Shuyao Kong, MEGA’s co-founder, disclosed the reduction in a Nov. 13 X post, saying the company had spent the past few months preparing to move in a new direction. Departing employees worked on the blockchain, wallet, ecosystem support, and communications from the project’s earliest days.
Over the past few months, we have restructured MEGA to move in a new direction.
— Shuyao Kong (@hotpot_dao) November 13, 2026
We’ve brought together new capabilities and reorganized our teams, a process that has resulted in a 20% reduction in our staff. These are people who helped build MEGA from its earliest days (…
The announcement did not give the number of people affected or a breakdown of cuts by team. Kong described the changes as a process of bringing together new capabilities and reorganizing existing teams.
MEGA retains its core engineers through restructuring
While announcing the departures, Kong said the founders, early employees and core engineering team remained committed to MEGA and the work they began three years ago with MegaETH.
She thanked departing colleagues and offered to introduce them to prospective employers, describing their contributions as foundational to the company’s next work.
“We believe cryptography and distributed systems will change how the world produces and accesses purified intelligence,” Kong wrote.
“We have a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead.”
The new organizational name does not replace the blockchain’s name. MEGA’s official website continues to list MegaETH as its blockchain division and describes MOSS as an account layer offering one wallet across applications, with programmable permissions for people and AI agents.
A December inference market leads the product plans
The foundation announced its rebrand on Nov. 10, alongside a $30 million commitment from its existing treasury to develop products on MegaETH.
Inference means running a trained AI model to generate an answer or another output. MEGA says its proposed market would let customers source comparable services from a larger pool of providers.
In their November white paper, Yilong Li and Lei Yang describe a problem facing unfamiliar suppliers: offering a cheaper service may not win customers who cannot establish which model is being used or how their data will be handled.
Their proposed “Purified Intelligence” approach would make inference interchangeable across providers that users might otherwise have little reason to trust. The paper presents this as a way to let more suppliers compete for customer demand.
Kong told The Block that details about the marketplace’s operation and available providers or models were being held until launch. All new products are intended to run on MegaETH, with planned network upgrades supporting the inference product.
Mega Mafia’s closure preceded the new approach
The team had already outlined a move toward building applications internally. In July, crypto.news reported that MegaETH was closing its accelerator after two Mega Mafia cohorts supported roughly 20 teams that collectively raised $80 million.
Kong said most successful applications supported by the program were no longer being built on MegaETH. The network had provided technical, management, and market-making help without taking equity, governance rights, or ownership in participating projects.
Global Token Exchange decided to build its own chain, Noise chose Base, and HelloTrade moved toward Monad. Cap launched on MegaETH while pursuing a multichain strategy.
At the time, Kong said resources would go toward first-party consumer products and “OMEGA” applications designed around capabilities the team considered specific to MegaETH.
MEGA’s token launched with performance-linked rewards
MegaETH launched its token on April 30 after 10 ecosystem applications met its first performance milestone. The project set a fixed supply of 10 billion MEGA, with 53.3% allocated to performance-based staking rewards.
In May, the foundation activated a stablecoin-funded buyback program, completing its first purchase with net income generated by USDm’s issuer through April 30. Future purchase sizes would depend on stablecoin supply and reserve yields.
USDm’s reserves primarily used BlackRock’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund BUIDL through Securitize, alongside liquid stablecoins for redemptions. The foundation said USDm was neither issued nor operated by the foundation or MegaLabs.