MEGA, the company behind the Ethereum layer 2 network MegaETH, has cut about 20% of its staff, co-founder Shuyao Kong said in a post on X on Friday 13 November, as reported by The Block at 19:26 UTC. The people leaving built the MegaETH chain, its wallet and its ecosystem. The founders, the early employees and the core engineering team stay. Neither Kong nor the company has given a headcount.
The MegaETH layoffs come three days after the same team renamed itself. On Tuesday 10 November the MegaETH Foundation became MEGA and committed $30 million from its existing treasury to new products, the first of them an AI inference market due in December.
“We have a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead,” Kong wrote, according to The Block.
Who leaves MEGA and who stays
The line runs along the old product map. The Defiant also reports that the departing staff worked on the chain, the wallet and the ecosystem. No number of people let go has been published, and MEGA has said nothing on severance, on the wallet’s future or on ecosystem programmes for existing apps.
The timing is not clear either. TokenPost writes that the restructuring took place “over the past few months”, which could mean part of the cuts came before the rebrand rather than after it.
From a fast layer 2 to an AI inference market
MegaETH was pitched as a very fast Ethereum layer 2, with a public mainnet that opened earlier in 2026. The 10 November rebrand moved the story elsewhere. MEGA calls its plan “Purified Intelligence”: a market where developers buy AI inference from different providers whose output can be swapped, so that more suppliers compete on price. Kong called inference the project’s “largest move”, said details of providers and models would come at the December launch, and told The Block: “We believe crypto is the only technology that makes AI fair and open.”
Co-founder Yilong Li framed the opening as a pricing problem. “There are still huge gaps between what providers charge for comparable inference,” he told The Block, adding: “We think those gaps can be dramatically reduced.”
Every new product is meant to run on MegaETH, and planned upgrades such as fast finality are tied to the inference service. On the token, Kong told The Block: “This is our mandate, so wherever there are ways to utilize the MEGA token, we will.” In The Block’s report on the cut, Kong went further: “We believe cryptography and distributed systems will change how the world produces and accesses purified intelligence.”
MegaETH TVL is down 96% from its May peak
The numbers on the chain explain why the team is looking for a new use. According to DefiLlama, the staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">total value locked (TVL) on MegaETH peaked at about $245.6 million on 12 May 2026. Its daily point for 13 November (00:00 UTC) shows about $8.8 million, down from $12.1 million two days earlier and roughly 96% below the peak. Stablecoins on the chain added up to about $22.9 million at 20:20 UTC on 13 November, per DefiLlama’s stablecoin data.
The MEGA token traded at about $0.0454 at 20:20 UTC on 13 November, according to DefiLlama’s price feed, close to the $0.045 or so The Block quoted when it reported the cut at 19:26 UTC, along with a 30-day gain of about 7.5%. On 10 November The Block put the token more than 76% below its all-time high.
| Measure | Figure | Date and source |
|---|---|---|
| MegaETH TVL, peak | about $245.6 million | 12 May 2026, DefiLlama |
| MegaETH TVL, latest | about $8.8 million | 13 Nov 2026 00:00 UTC, DefiLlama |
| Stablecoins on MegaETH | about $22.9 million | 13 Nov 2026 20:20 UTC, DefiLlama |
| MEGA price | about $0.0454 | 13 Nov 2026 20:20 UTC, DefiLlama |
| Staff cut | about 20% | 13 Nov 2026, Kong on X via The Block |
| New product budget | $30 million | 10 Nov 2026, The Block |
TVL is a rough gauge, as our guide to measuring DeFi TVL explains, but most of the money that arrived around launch has left.
Over $80 million raised, and a treasury of unknown size
The Block counts more than $80 million raised: a $20 million seed round in June 2024 led by Dragonfly, with Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Lubin among the backers, a $10 million round on Echo in December 2024, about $13 million from the Fluffle NFT sale in February 2025 and about $40 million from the public token sale in October 2025. In the summer of 2025 the team also bought back a 4.75% stake, equity and token warrants, from pre-seed investors.
What it has left is not public. The $30 million comes “from existing treasury”, but the size of that treasury and how long it can pay for a smaller team have not been disclosed.
The token side adds another question. MEGA went live on 30 April 2026 with a fixed supply of 10 billion, and 53.3% of it is tied to staking rewards released when the network hits performance targets (KPIs) rather than on a calendar. The first one, ten live apps, was met on 23 April. Another target is $500 million of USDM, the stablecoin built with Ethena. How a shift to AI inference changes those targets has not been explained. Our tokenomics entry explains why such release rules matter.
What to watch before the December launch
MEGA is not alone in cutting. Polymarket confirmed layoffs a day earlier without giving a number, as we reported on 12 November.
For MegaETH users, the next fixed point is the inference market in December, when MEGA says it will name providers and models. Until then the open items are the headcount, the wallet’s future, the treasury, and whether the KPI rewards still track a chain whose TVL has shrunk this far. Readers new to the model can start with our explainer on how layer 2 rollups make Ethereum cheaper.