MEGA Cuts 20% of Staff Days After Pledging $30 Million to AI

Three days separate a product pledge from a layoff at the organisation behind the Ethereum layer-2 MegaETH. MEGA, which was the MegaETH Foundation until 10 November, said on Friday that it had reorganised its teams and shed 20% of its staff. The people who went worked on the blockchain, the wallet and ecosystem support. Co-founder Shuyao Kong announced the rebrand and then the cut, and gave no headcount either time. The $30 million behind the new direction comes from the treasury the project already holds, and the first thing it buys is an AI inference market due in December.

What the money is for

Inference is the step where a trained model answers a request, and it is what providers bill for. MEGA's pitch is that the same request costs very different amounts depending on who serves it, and that a market could close the gap. The whitepaper calls the idea Purified Intelligence. Kong told The Block on 10 November that the details of how the marketplace works, and which providers or models are in it, were being held until launch.

"There are still huge gaps between what providers charge for comparable inference," MegaETH co-founder Yilong Li said in a statement, adding that he thinks those gaps can be reduced dramatically.

The number nobody has given

Five accounts of Friday's announcement carry the same percentage and not one carries a headcount. crypto.news says the announcement gave no number of people affected and no breakdown by team. Cointelegraph says Kong did not disclose how many were affected or when the cuts happened. Cryptopolitan points out that MEGA has never published a total employee count, which leaves 20% of an unknown. All five trace to one post by Kong, so the figure has a single source and five repetitions. Kong said the founders, early employees and core engineering team stay. Who maintains the layer-2 from here is named nowhere.

"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."

A smaller network than it was

The chain the products are meant to run on has been emptying. The Block put total value locked at about $12 million on 10 November, citing DefiLlama, down from a peak above $245 million. Cryptopolitan read it at about $9.8 million on 13 November, against the same peak. Those are readings three days apart and not competing counts of one day. The MEGA token traded near $0.045 on Friday, a level two outlets give independently. KuCoin alone has it up about 7.5% over 30 days, and Cryptopolitan alone puts the April high at roughly $0.209. No account attributes any price move to the layoff or the pledge. The token has a fixed supply of 10 billion, with 53.3% tied to performance milestones instead of a vesting clock.

December is the test

One figure in the coverage does not survive a cross-check. The Block, citing Kong, puts MEGA's lifetime fundraising above $80 million: a $20 million seed led by Dragonfly in June 2024, a $10 million Echo round that December, about $13 million from an NFT sale and about $40 million from last October's token sale. Cryptopolitan agrees the team raised it. crypto.news attaches the same $80 million to something else, saying roughly 20 teams in MEGA's accelerator raised it between them. The number matches and the subject does not. They do not reconcile.

Kong's own words arrive in two renderings. crypto.news and The Block both have him saying distributed systems will change how the world accesses "purified intelligence". ChainCatcher's version, carried by KuCoin, says "pure intelligence". The Ethereum Foundation cut 54 staff this year, and Blast set an exit date for its layer-2 altogether, so a smaller payroll around an Ethereum rollup is not new. The order is what stands out. The pledge came first, the cut second, and Cointelegraph notes Kong did not directly link the two. The marketplace opens next month, and nothing published so far names a provider, a model or a price.

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