MEGA Cuts 20% of Team Ahead of December Product Plan

By Marcus Bennett

MEGA completed a restructuring that reduced its team by 20% over the past few months, co-founder Shuyao Kong said, while shifting the organization from the MegaETH Foundation to MEGA.

The announcement gave no starting headcount, severance terms or detailed reorganization timetable. Its disclosed focus is narrower: founders, early employees and the core engineering team remain, while employees working on public blockchain development, wallets and ecosystem support have departed.

Kong said: “The founders, early employees and core engineering team will remain with MEGA.” That is the clearest boundary around the completed workforce reduction. The retained group now must carry MEGA’s transition from the MegaETH Foundation into a product organization with a defined first release.

What does the restructuring change for developers and users?

For developers and users, the immediate change concerns execution rather than a disclosed protocol change. MEGA has not set out technical specifications for its planned products in the announcement. The practical effect is a smaller organization centered on the core engineering team, with fewer people previously assigned to public blockchain development, wallets and ecosystem support.

This is not the same as saying those capabilities have been discontinued. Kong identified the work of the departing employees but did not say whether MEGA will maintain, outsource or discontinue each function. The practical result is less staffing breadth across those areas at the start of the new structure.

That matters for a December launch. A smaller core team can move more directly toward a single initial product, but it has less capacity for parallel engineering and support work. The retained founders and early employees will need to coordinate product delivery, technical development and external support with 20% fewer colleagues than the team had before the restructuring.

MEGA also has a $30 million treasury commitment supporting multiple products built on MegaETH. The commitment gives the reorganization a financial center of gravity. It links the retained team to a funded product pipeline rather than an open-ended restructuring exercise. MEGA has not specified the commitment’s deployment schedule or allocation among products.

The first planned product is an AI inference marketplace. It is scheduled to launch in December, though MEGA has not disclosed a launch day, product scope or commercial terms. Naming it first makes the marketplace the clearest test of whether the smaller team and treasury-backed structure can turn MEGA’s strategy into a working offering.

Kong said: “cryptography and distributed systems will change how people produce and access intelligence.” The statement supplies the strategic rationale for moving toward products, including AI inference. It is also broader than the immediate staffing decision, which concerns execution across blockchain development, wallets and ecosystem support.

The AI inference marketplace is the first concrete expression of that thesis. Whether it launches on schedule will show whether MEGA can convert a narrowed organization into a product operation without immediately rebuilding the functions affected by the cuts.

The next checkpoint is December. A launch on the stated schedule would give MEGA the first product on its post-restructuring roadmap and make the $30 million treasury commitment testable against delivery. A delay would leave the retained team with less room to absorb another setback, because public blockchain development, wallet and ecosystem-support capacity has already been reduced.