MEGA Cuts 20% of Staff as MegaETH Parent Pivots Toward AI

MEGA, the organization behind the Ethereum layer-2 network MegaETH, has cut 20% of its workforce following months of restructuring, as it redirects resources toward artificial intelligence products built on its chain.

Co-founder Shuyao Kong disclosed the reduction on Friday, saying the reorganization spanned teams responsible for the blockchain itself, the project's wallet, ecosystem support and communications. She did not disclose the headcount affected or the timing of the departures.

"We've brought together new capabilities and reorganized our teams, a process that has resulted in a 20% reduction in our staff," Kong said. "These are people who helped build MEGA from its earliest days."

Kong added that MEGA's founders, early employees and core engineering team remain with the organization. That distinction matters for a network that has staked its reputation on technical performance: MegaETH recorded roughly 35,000 transactions per second in testing before its mainnet launched on February 9.

Where the money is going

The layoffs coincide with a strategic expansion into AI. MEGA has committed $30 million to the initiative, though Kong declined to draw a direct line between the workforce reduction and the new strategy.

The technical blueprint comes from a whitepaper by co-founders Yilong Li and Lei Yang. The document outlines a proposed inference market, a marketplace where users can choose among competing AI service providers running on the network.

The design targets two persistent problems in commercial AI inference: whether a provider actually serves the model it advertises, and how it handles customer data. An on-chain inference market, in the co-founders' framing, gives participants a neutral settlement and verification layer rather than trusting a single vendor's claims.

Kong said MEGA plans to launch the public inference market in December.

What does this change for builders on MegaETH?

For teams already deploying on the network, the restructuring signals a shift in what the parent organization will fund and staff. Positions tied to ecosystem support and communications were among those cut, which typically means fewer internal resources dedicated to developer relations and grant-style backing in the near term. The core engineering function, by Kong's account, is intact.

For infrastructure and AI developers, the December launch opens a new deployment target. An inference market with multiple providers competing on-chain could let applications route computation by price and verifiability rather than negotiating individual vendor agreements. That is the thesis; the execution detail will be in how model attestation and data-handling guarantees are enforced in practice.

The $30 million commitment, set against a 20% workforce reduction, suggests MEGA is funding the AI push partly through operating-cost discipline rather than new external capital. Kong did not say whether the figure covers engineering, liquidity incentives, or third-party provider subsidies.

The competitive frame

MegaETH is one of several Ethereum layer-2 networks chasing real-time performance, and its differentiation to date has rested on throughput benchmarks. Adding an AI inference market moves the organization into a category where it will compete not only with other rollups but with specialized decentralized-compute projects and centralized inference providers.

The December launch date now serves as the organization's first concrete external checkpoint. Whether the inference market attracts providers at launch, and whether the slimmed-down team can support them, will define how the restructuring reads in retrospect.