MegaETH shuts down Mega Mafia accelerator after $80 million in portfolio exits

MegaETH shut down its two-year-old Mega Mafia accelerator program after most of the roughly 20 teams it backed migrated to competing blockchains, co-founder Shuyao Kong confirmed July 16. The program helped startups raise $80 million across two cohorts, but "very little of that value has trickled to Mega," Kong said.

"While it was a success in many ways, we believe that the program was built on assumptions that no longer hold," Kong, a core team member at MegaETH, said in a post on X. MegaETH did not take equity, governance rights, or ownership stakes in any of the incubated projects, a structure Kong said was designed to build alignment without financial obligation.

Among the notable departures, Global Token Exchange decided to launch its own sovereign blockchain, Noise moved to Coinbase's Base network, HelloTrade migrated to Monad, and stablecoin issuer Cap adopted a multichain strategy after initially launching on MegaETH. Two of the five incubated applications have ceased operations entirely. The program's closure comes just months after MegaETH launched its native MEGA token on April 30, following performance milestones achieved by ten ecosystem apps.

MegaETH will now redirect resources toward building first-party consumer applications, which it calls OMEGA apps — products designed to run exclusively on its infrastructure. The network will also continue its stablecoin-based economic model, using net income from USDm stablecoins to buy back MEGA tokens. The pivot reduces the platform's reliance on external startups to drive transaction volume and user growth, though it leaves a gap in developer onboarding that the accelerator had filled.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.