MegaETH is winding down its two-year Mega Mafia accelerator after concluding the program helped startups raise significant capital but failed to retain enough value and activity within the MegaETH ecosystem.
What happened
- Mega Mafia ran two cohorts and supported roughly 20 teams that together raised about $80 million from pre-seed through Series A rounds. The accelerator paired startups with MegaETH core developers and offered technical, management and market-making support — but did not take equity, governance rights, or ownership in the projects.
- Core team member Shuyao Kong announced on X that while the program produced successful startups, most of those projects no longer build on MegaETH. “Very little of that value has trickled to Mega,” she wrote, and confirmed there will be no Mega Mafia 3.0.
Examples of projects that moved away
- Global Token Exchange (GTE) opted to build its own chain after the first cohort.
- Social attention market Noise migrated to Base.
- HelloTrade shifted toward Monad.
- Stablecoin project Cap launched on MegaETH but has pursued a broader multichain approach.
Why MegaETH is changing course
MegaETH says the accelerator was founded on the assumption that founders would remain aligned with the network without formal ownership arrangements — an assumption that didn’t hold. Although Mega Mafia played a central role in bootstrapping usage and helping MegaETH transition to mainnet activity, the network says too much of the economic upside left with individual startups.
The accelerator was closely tied to an early network milestone: on April 30 MegaETH launched its MEGA token after 10 ecosystem applications met the performance targets required to trigger the token generation event. Since then, the MegaETH Foundation has also introduced a MEGA token buyback program funded by net income from the USDm stablecoin issuer, linking stablecoin activity to recurring token purchases as the team develops onchain apps.
What comes next
Instead of continuing Mega Mafia, MegaETH will redirect resources toward “OMEGA” applications — first-party, consumer-facing products built around capabilities MegaETH believes are unique to its chain. The new approach includes:
- Direct investment in and development of first-party consumer apps.
- Building direct relationships with end users rather than relying primarily on independent startups to generate demand and return value to the network.
- Greater responsibility for product outcomes sitting with the MegaETH team.
Bottom line
MegaETH is testing whether creating and owning more consumer-facing products will keep users, activity and economic value closer to its core ecosystem — a strategic pivot prompted by the accelerator’s success in creating startups that ultimately chose other technical paths.
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