• MEGA, formerly MegaETH Foundation, dismissed around 20% of its staff on November 13.

• MEGA allocated $30 million from its treasury to new products three days before the cuts.

• The team previously raised more than $80 million through investments, an NFT sale and token sales.

Who Leaves, Who Stays at MEGA

MEGA, the foundation behind the Ethereum layer-2 network MegaETH, dismissed roughly 20% of its workforce on November 13, three days after locking in a $30 million program of products that reach beyond its blockchain. The reduction covered staff who built the network's layer-2 infrastructure, its wallet and the ecosystem around both. Co-founder Shuyao Kong described the layoffs as the outcome of several months of restructuring, confirmed them in a public announcement, and acknowledged that some of those leaving had been involved with MegaETH from the beginning. The founders, the first group of employees and the core engineering team remain in place. MEGA has never published its total headcount, so the absolute number of departures is unknown, and Kong did not put a figure on the cuts herself.

The order of events is clearer. On November 10, the organization rebranded from MegaETH Foundation to MEGA, a change meant to signal that it would build products alongside the chain rather than only maintain it. The rebrand and the $30 million commitment were announced together, and the layoffs followed within days. Kong's account separates the reduction from any sudden cash problem: the restructuring had been under way for months, and the $30 million plan came first.

Institutional memory leaves with the departures, since people present at the chain's earliest build-out are among them, and the company has not detailed how the cuts fall between engineering and other functions. What the foundation is buying with the smaller payroll is runway for the new plan. Its flagship, an AI inference marketplace set for December, now falls to a leaner team, and whether that team can keep the network running while shipping software the chain has never carried is the question December will answer.

The $30 Million Treasury Bet

The $30 million comes out of the foundation's existing treasury rather than a fresh fundraising round. The MegaETH team had previously raised more than $80 million through venture investments, an NFT sale and token sales, so the expansion is funded with money already on the balance sheet. The marketplace is the largest of the planned ventures. Inference, the act of generating answers with a trained AI model, is the phase of artificial intelligence where compute costs pile up and supplier margins get decided. MEGA's whitepaper argues that developers avoid cheaper service providers because they cannot verify that the advertised models are what they claim, or how their data is protected. The foundation calls its proposed answer “Purified Intelligence”, a framework intended to make services from different providers easier to trust and evaluate. The marketplace will run on the MegaETH chain itself, a scaling network in the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Upgrades for quicker transaction finality are already on the roadmap, work that runs parallel to a wider design effort to give Ethereum rollups same-block rollup calls in a 12-second slot. Which suppliers and which models will appear on the marketplace is still undisclosed, so the commercial case rests on the whitepaper for now. Competition is the second open risk: an OECD report warns that access to computing power remains concentrated even as more inference suppliers enter and prices fall.

The hiring backdrop sharpens the picture. A Tiger Research analysis put crypto job advertisements down almost 80% in January 2026 against the same period a year earlier, a slide that tracks the sector's move into a bear market. Coinbase said in May it would cut 14% of its workforce, tying the decision to market conditions and the arrival of AI. FICO's SEC filing showed a 15% reduction carrying $27 million in costs. None of those cuts has yet been shown to pay for itself.

Layoffs alone do not prove that AI returns the money spent on it. A Gartner survey of 350 executives at large companies found that roughly 80% of organizations testing or using autonomous technologies had carried out job cuts, and that the cuts were as common among businesses with strong returns as among those with weaker ones. MEGA's market position raises the pressure: on-chain data puts the value locked in MegaETH's decentralized-finance applications near $9.8 million on November 13, down from a peak above $245 million, and the MEGA token changes hands near $0.045, far below its April high of about $0.209. The wider market offers little cushion. Ethereum ETFs had logged a sixth straight outflow day with a $70.5 million exit before a $2.3 million net gain on Friday, driven by a single $11.6 million Fidelity inflow, broke the run. The December launch is the first real test of whether developers will pay.