MEGA cuts 20% of staff as it pivots to a $30 million AI product push

What happened

MEGA, the organization behind the Ethereum layer-2 network MegaETH, has reduced its workforce by 20% as part of a restructuring, co-founder Shuyao Kong said in a Nov. 13 post on X. The cuts hit staff who worked on the blockchain, wallet, ecosystem support and communications, some of whom had been with the project since its earliest days. Kong did not say how many employees were affected or provide a breakdown by team.

Kong described the changes as bringing in new capabilities while reorganizing existing teams. She said the founders, early employees and core engineering group remain committed to the organization and to the work they started roughly three years ago with MegaETH. She thanked departing colleagues and offered to introduce them to prospective employers, calling their contributions foundational to what the company does next. She also wrote that the team believes cryptography and distributed systems will change how the world produces and accesses intelligence, and that a lot of work lies ahead.

The reduction came days after the MegaETH Foundation adopted the name MEGA on Nov. 10 and pledged $30 million from its existing treasury to develop products on the network, beginning with an artificial intelligence inference marketplace. Kong did not directly connect the layoffs to that strategy. Cointelegraph and Crypto.news both reported the restructuring, with Crypto.news noting the announcement was made on X and that the new organizational name does not replace the blockchain's name. MEGA's website still lists MegaETH as its blockchain division and describes MOSS as an account layer providing one wallet across applications with programmable permissions for people and AI agents.