MEGA, the former MegaETH Foundation, cuts 20% of staff three days after pledging $30 million to an AI inference push

MEGA, the team behind the MegaETH network, has cut 20% of its workforce, co-founder Shuyao Kong said in a post on X on November 13, The Block and crypto.news reported. It did not say how many people lost their jobs.

The cuts fell on staff who worked on the MegaETH Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, its wallet and its ecosystem, according to The Block. The founders, early employees and core engineering team remain. Kong said the team had "a lot to prove, and a lot of work ahead."

The layoffs came three days after the MegaETH Foundation renamed itself MEGA and committed $30 million from its existing treasury to new products. The first is a market for AI inference, the step of running a trained AI model to produce answers, which MEGA plans to launch in December. It has not said how the market will work or which providers and models it will offer. All of the new products will run on MegaETH, it said.

MEGA's token launched in April. It traded around $0.045 when The Block published its report, up about 7.5% over the previous 30 days.