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1. MEGA trims its workforce by 20%
MEGA, the organization that operates the MegaETH layer-2 network on Ethereum, has reduced its headcount by 20%, co-founder Shuyao Kong said on Friday, November 13. The MegaETH layoffs come after several months of internal restructuring linked to the group's expansion into artificial intelligence products, an effort backed by a $30 million commitment.
Kong disclosed the cuts in a post on X. She explained that teams had been reorganized and that employees working on the network's blockchain, its wallet, ecosystem support and communications were among those who departed. She did not say how many people lost their jobs, and she did not give a date for when the departures took effect.
The announcement lands at a moment when MEGA is trying to redefine what kind of organization it is. For most of its existence, the group was known chiefly as the builder of a fast Ethereum scaling network. It is now positioning itself to ship its own products on top of that network, starting with a service aimed at the market for running AI models.
2. Who was affected by the MegaETH layoffs?
The departures touched four functions: blockchain development, the wallet product, ecosystem support and communications. Kong stressed that the people leaving were not newcomers. In her post, she described them as people who helped build MEGA from its earliest days, a framing that signals the cuts reached into teams that had been in place since the project's formative period.
Each of those functions plays a distinct role at a network company. Blockchain engineers work on the protocol itself, the software that orders transactions and keeps the chain running. Wallet teams build the interface that users rely on to hold assets and sign transactions. Ecosystem support staff work with outside developers and projects that build applications on the network, helping them launch and grow. Communications staff handle how the organization explains itself to users, partners and the public.
Kong also said the reorganization brought new capabilities into the company, indicating that the restructuring was not purely a reduction. The change appears to have involved reshaping the mix of skills inside MEGA as well as shrinking its overall size, although she did not describe which new capabilities had been added.
3. Founders and core engineers stay on
Kong was explicit about who remains. The founders, the early employees and the core engineering team are all still with the organization, she said. That statement is meant to reassure users and partners that the people most responsible for the network's technical direction have not walked away.
For a blockchain network, continuity in the core engineering group is a meaningful signal. The engineers who designed a system tend to hold the deepest understanding of how it behaves under load, where its weak points are and how it should evolve. By naming that group specifically, Kong drew a line between the parts of the organization being reshaped and the parts being preserved.
The distinction also matters for anyone weighing the network's future. Cuts to ecosystem support and communications affect how the organization interacts with the outside world, while cuts to blockchain and wallet teams affect what it builds. Keeping the core engineers in place suggests MEGA intends to keep maintaining and developing its base technology even as it redirects resources toward new products.
4. What is MegaETH?
MegaETH is a layer-2 network built on Ethereum (ETH). Layer-2 networks process transactions outside Ethereum's main chain and then rely on Ethereum for security and final settlement. The approach lets them handle more activity at lower cost than the base layer can manage on its own, while still inheriting much of Ethereum's trust model.
Dozens of layer-2 networks now compete for users, developers and liquidity, and they tend to differentiate themselves on speed, fees and the applications they attract. MegaETH has built its identity around performance, aiming to give developers a network fast enough to support applications that feel closer to traditional web services than to typical blockchain apps.
MEGA is the organization behind that network. The names are often used interchangeably, but the distinction is useful in this story: MegaETH is the technology, and MEGA is the team and company that build and operate it. The layoffs and the new AI strategy belong to MEGA, while the network itself continues to run.
5. A $30 million push into AI products
The staff reduction coincides with a strategic shift at MEGA toward building its own products on the MegaETH network, with AI services at the center. The organization has committed $30 million to that effort.
That is a notable change in posture for a network operator. Many blockchain infrastructure teams concentrate on the base layer and leave application development to outside builders, supporting them through grants, technical help and marketing. By committing capital to first-party products, MEGA is choosing to become one of the main builders on its own platform rather than relying solely on others to create demand for it.
Kong did not directly tie the job cuts to the new strategy in her post. The timing, however, places the two developments side by side: a smaller team, reorganized over recent months, and a sizable budget directed at a new product line. Readers should note that the connection between them is a matter of sequence, not something MEGA's leadership has spelled out.
6. How would MEGA's AI inference market work?
MEGA's planned inference market would let users pick among competing AI providers, according to a whitepaper from the organization's co-founders, including Yilong Li. Inference is the stage at which a trained AI model is actually put to work, answering a question, generating text or analyzing data in response to a request. It is the part of AI that customers pay for every time they use a model.
The whitepaper frames the market around two problems. The first is whether a provider is really running the model it claims to be running. A customer paying for a particular model generally has no direct way to check that the answers come from that model rather than from a cheaper or smaller substitute. The second is how providers treat the data customers send them, since prompts and documents submitted for inference can contain sensitive personal or business information.
Both concerns are about trust between buyers and sellers of computing services. A marketplace that can give users more assurance on what model is running and how their data is handled could make it easier to switch between providers based on price and quality. That is the logic behind building the service as a market with multiple providers rather than as a single in-house AI offering.
Running such a market on a blockchain network is a natural fit for the problem MEGA describes. Public ledgers are designed to make records of activity visible and difficult to alter, which is the kind of property that can support accountability between parties who do not otherwise trust each other. The whitepaper's approach builds on that idea to address the gap between what AI providers promise and what customers can verify.
7. Why the restructuring matters for MegaETH users
For people who use the MegaETH network or build on it, the reorganization raises practical questions. The cuts to ecosystem support touch the staff who typically help outside developers bring applications to the network. Changes in the wallet team affect a product that sits directly between the network and its users. Kong's post did not address how those services will be handled going forward.
At the same time, the commitment of the founders and core engineers is the main point MEGA has chosen to emphasize. The message is that the organization's technical backbone remains intact, and that the changes are about reshaping how the company spends its time and money rather than retreating from the network.
Workforce reductions of this kind are a familiar feature of the crypto industry, where organizations often resize teams as their priorities shift. What makes MEGA's case distinctive is the direction of the shift. Rather than narrowing its focus purely to protocol work, the organization is widening its ambitions into AI, a field with its own competitive pressures and technical demands, while operating with fewer people than before.
8. Kong's message to departing staff
The tone of Kong's announcement was one of acknowledgment rather than justification. By describing the departing employees as people who helped build the organization from its earliest days, she placed their contribution at the center of the message instead of focusing on the business rationale.
That choice matters in a sector where community relationships carry real weight. Many of the employees who work on wallets, ecosystem programs and communications are the public faces of a network, the people developers and users interact with most directly. Recognizing them openly is a way of signaling respect for that work, even as their roles come to an end.
Kong's post left several details unaddressed, including the total number of employees affected and the timing of the departures. Those gaps mean the full scale of the change is still unclear from the outside, beyond the 20% figure she provided.
9. What's next: a public launch in December
MEGA plans to open its public inference market in December, Kong said. That launch will be the first concrete test of the organization's new direction and of the $30 million it has committed to building products on MegaETH.
The debut will show whether the ideas in the co-founders' whitepaper translate into a working service: one where users can choose among competing AI providers and gain more confidence about which model is answering their requests and how their data is treated. It will also show how a leaner MEGA, now built around its founders, early staff and core engineers, handles a product launch in a field outside its original focus.
Until then, the 20% workforce reduction stands as the clearest sign of how much the organization has changed in recent months. MEGA is betting that a smaller team and a new product line can broaden the role of the MegaETH network, and December's launch will be the first opportunity to judge whether that bet is taking shape.