MEGA Cuts 20% of Staff, Funding AI Pivot From $MEGA Treasury

MEGA has cut 20% of its workforce following the MegaETH rebrand and a strategic pivot toward AI products, a person familiar with the restructuring confirmed to The Block. The layoffs touched staff across blockchain development, wallet operations, ecosystem support and communications.

The cuts land after a busy stretch for the project. MegaETH rebranded to MEGA, kept the underlying blockchain's name, and in July announced it would shut down its Mega Mafia accelerator to focus on building its own applications. Now the headcount reduction makes the pivot literal: fewer people, sharper focus, new products funded from the project's own treasury.

Spokesperson Kong did not disclose the number of affected employees. She offered no team-specific figures either. She did say $MEGA's founders and core engineers remain committed to the project — the people designing the roadmap are staying, even as the support functions around them shrink.

Where does the money for new products come from?

Funding for the AI product line will come from $MEGA's existing treasury, not a new raise. Each new product will run on MegaETH, which retains its name despite the corporate rebrand above it. Details about which AI providers and models the products will use remain undisclosed. Kong told The Block those specifics will arrive at launch.

That leaves a deliberate information gap for now. The project is committing capital and infrastructure before naming its AI suppliers — an unusual sequencing for a company asking users to trust its verification claims.

Why build AI apps on a blockchain?

The intellectual case sits in a November white paper from Yilong Li and Lei Yang. The two authors identified two structural problems in how AI services are bought and sold today.

• Verification gaps. Buyers often cannot verify which models an unfamiliar provider actually runs.
• Data uncertainty. It is unclear how suppliers handle customer data after it leaves the buyer's hands.

Under the $MEGA proposal, more suppliers could compete by offering comparable AI services — a market-structure argument, not a token-marketing one. The pitch is that a shared chain makes provider claims legible and substitutability real, which in theory pressures incumbents and lowers prices.

What happened to the accelerator?

The Mega Mafia program ran two cohorts and hosted roughly 20 teams. Those teams raised a combined $80 million — by most accelerator standards, a strong outcome. Yet Kong said most of the program's successful apps were already in development elsewhere before joining, which undercut the accelerator's value proposition: if winners arrive pre-built, the program adds distribution more than formation.

That admission explains the July decision to close the program and internalize product development. Rather than seeding an ecosystem and hoping it compounds, MEGA now builds first-party apps on its own chain, funded from its own balance sheet.

What does this change for the project's trajectory? It concentrates risk. Treasury-funded, first-party development succeeds or fails on execution, with no accelerator portfolio to point to as ecosystem traction.

The next concrete signal will come at product launch, when MEGA finally names its AI providers and models — the disclosure that will test whether the white paper's verification argument holds up in practice.