MEGA cuts a fifth of its staff days after a $30 million AI bet

A fifth of the staff, three days after the money

The organization behind the Ethereum layer-2 network MegaETH has cut 20% of its workforce 1

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. Three days earlier, the MegaETH Foundation renamed itself MEGA and, per one outlet, committed $30 million out of its existing treasury for new products 2

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Co-founder Shuyao Kong confirmed the cuts in a November 13 X post 2

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. "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," she said 1

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. The departing staff included people who built the blockchain itself, along with wallet, ecosystem and communications teams. Kong did not disclose how many people left or how large the workforce was to begin with, so the absolute scale of the cut is unknown 1

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What the money is for

The $30 million goes toward an AI inference market planned for December 2026, where customers choose between competing AI service providers and the MegaETH blockchain records what happened 1

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. It is the first product announced under the new strategy, planned for December 2026, and the reason the reorganization happened when it did, per the company's own framing 1

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A November whitepaper by co-founders Yilong Li and Lei Yang lays out the pitch: buyers may avoid cheaper AI providers they cannot verify 1

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. The chain would give them a way to check which models actually ran and how their data was handled. The company brands the approach "Purified Intelligence" 1

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. The whitepaper itself notes a limit: a blockchain record alone cannot show whether a provider actually finished an AI job to the standard agreed 2

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Kong said the organization had brought together new capabilities and reorganized its teams while pursuing a different business direction 1

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. She did not directly tie the cuts to the AI strategy 1

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. The founders, early employees and core engineers are staying on, she said, and she offered to help departing staff find employers 1

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The retreat from ecosystem work began months earlier. In July, MEGA shut down its Mega Mafia accelerator, which had backed about 20 teams across two cohorts that raised roughly $80 million combined, per one outlet 2

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. Kong said at the time that several successful projects had left the network to build their own chains or move to competitors 2

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What is still unknown

No list of providers for the December marketplace has been published, and the layoff announcement did not say whether the $30 million allocation or the launch timetable has changed 2

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. "We have a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead," Kong said 2

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