MEGA Cuts 20% of Workforce Days After $30 Million Rebrand Push

MEGA, the company until this week known as the MegaETH Foundation, has cut 20% of its workforce as part of a restructuring tied to its new strategic direction, co-founder Shuyao Kong announced in a post on X. The layoffs land days after the organization rebranded as MEGA and committed $30 million to building new products, including AI inference services.

The reduction affects employees who built the Ethereum Layer 2 MegaETH blockchain, its wallet, and the surrounding ecosystem. The founders, early employees, and the core engineering team remain with the project, according to Kong's announcement.

What does the restructuring change for the project?

The restructuring narrows the organization around a new thesis. Kong framed the pivot in expansive terms: "We believe cryptography and distributed systems will change how the world produces and accesses purified intelligence." She added, "We have a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead."

In an interview with The Block, Kong articulated the commercial logic behind the shift: "We believe crypto is the only technology that makes AI fair and open." That framing positions MEGA's $30 million commitment as a bet that blockchain infrastructure can serve as a verification and access layer for artificial intelligence workloads, rather than purely as a scaling layer for Ethereum transactions.

For practitioners, the change matters in three concrete ways:

• The teams that built the MegaETH rollup, wallet, and ecosystem tooling are shrinking by one fifth, which concentrates operational knowledge among founders, early staff, and core engineers.
• The $30 million earmarked for new products signals a capital allocation shift away from pure Layer 2 development and toward AI inference as a product line.
• The tokenomics structure remains anchored to the original blockchain roadmap rather than the new direction, at least for now.

Where does the token stand?

The MEGA token, launched by the MegaETH team in April after the project hit its first performance milestone, trades around $0.045 at publication time, up approximately 7.5% over the past 30 days. The launch tied 53.3% of the token supply to KPI-based staking rewards, meaning more than half of all MEGA circulates or vests according to measurable performance targets rather than a fixed schedule.

That structure now intersects with the pivot in a way holders will scrutinize. If the KPIs were calibrated to Layer 2 performance metrics, and the company's center of gravity moves toward AI inference products, the question of whether those milestones are recalibrated becomes material. Kong's announcement did not specify how the restructuring affects the staking reward framework.

A compressed timeline

The sequence of events is notable for its speed. Within a single week, the organization executed a rebrand from MegaETH Foundation to MEGA, announced a $30 million product expansion commitment, and reduced headcount by 20%. Compressed rebrand-and-restructure sequences of this kind typically signal that the strategic decision preceded the public rollout by some margin, and that the workforce reduction was planned as part of the transition rather than as a reaction to it.

For the retained engineering core, the immediate task is execution: Kong's own words, "a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead," acknowledge that the AI inference thesis remains unproven in product form. The market's near-term test will be whether MEGA ships a functioning inference product backed by the $30 million commitment before the next KPI milestone tied to the 53.3% staking allocation comes due.