MEGA cuts 20% of staff as it shifts toward AI products

Kong did not disclose how many employees were affected or how the cuts were distributed across teams. Departing staff had worked on the blockchain, wallet, ecosystem support and communications from MEGA’s early days. Kong said the company had brought in new capabilities and reorganized its teams, while founders, early employees and the core engineering team remained committed to the project and work begun with MegaETH three years ago. She thanked departing colleagues and offered to connect them with prospective employers.

The rebrand did not change the blockchain’s name: MEGA’s website still identifies MegaETH as its blockchain division. It describes MOSS as an account layer intended to provide one wallet across applications, with programmable permissions for people and AI agents. The foundation announced the rebrand and $30 million product commitment on Nov. 10.

The planned inference market would let customers compare services from a broader pool of providers. Inference is the process of running a trained AI model to produce an answer or other output. A November white paper by Yilong Li and Lei Yang argues that unfamiliar suppliers may struggle to win customers who cannot verify which model is being used or how their data will be handled. Its proposed “Purified Intelligence” approach aims to make inference interchangeable across providers. Kong told The Block that details on the marketplace, including its providers and models, would be held until launch. The products are intended to run on MegaETH, with network upgrades planned to support the inference service.

The shift follows MEGA’s decision in July to close its Mega Mafia accelerator. Two cohorts had supported roughly 20 teams that collectively raised $80 million, according to crypto.news. Kong said most successful supported applications were no longer being built on MegaETH. Global Token Exchange chose to build its own chain, Noise chose Base, HelloTrade moved toward Monad, and Cap launched on MegaETH while pursuing a multichain strategy. Kong said the team would instead focus resources on first-party consumer products and “OMEGA” applications designed around capabilities it considers specific to MegaETH.

MEGA’s token launched on April 30 after 10 ecosystem applications met the project’s first performance milestone. Its fixed supply is 10 billion tokens, with 53.3% allocated to performance-based staking rewards. In May, the foundation activated a stablecoin-funded buyback program, making its first purchase with net income generated by USDm’s issuer through April 30. The foundation said USDm is not issued or operated by it or MegaLabs; its reserves primarily used BlackRock’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund BUIDL through Securitize, alongside liquid stablecoins for redemptions.