TL;DR:
- The MegaETH Mega Mafia acceleration program ends after two years of activity and supporting two cohorts of startups.
- The startups incubated under this program managed to raise approximately $80 million in funding.
- The vast majority of the program’s flagship projects opted to migrate or expand to competing networks such as Base and Monad.
MegaETH, an Ethereum scalability project, closed its flagship acceleration program, called Mega Mafia. The information was revealed this Thursday by Shuyao Kong, a member of the platform’s core team, through a post on X.
After spending the last two years building the MegaMafia, we’ve decided to sunset the program.
While it was a success in many ways, we believe that the program was built on assumptions that no longer hold.
Here are some reflections, and what’s coming up next.
> We had real…
— Shuyao Kong (@hotpot_dao) July 16, 2026
Kong noted that while the initiative achieved significant success in various areas, the team believes the program was structured under assumptions that are no longer valid in today’s market.
During its operating period, the program directly selected close to 20 development teams to live and collaborate closely with the protocol’s founders. These startups received technical, management, and market-making support. The executive indicated that the total value of funding obtained by these companies, from pre-seed rounds to Series A with venture capital, reached $80 million.
Project flight to competing networks
The main reason behind the closure of the program lies in the retention of the generated value. According to Kong’s report, a considerable portion of the benefit did not consolidate within the native ecosystem, as most of the incubated applications stopped building on MegaETH.
Several of the highest-profile projects that were part of Mega Mafia chose to migrate their operations to other ecosystems:
Global Token Exchange (GTE): The flagship project of the first cohort announced that it will develop its own blockchain network. The firm has raised $25 million across various investment rounds.
Noise: This social attention market platform, which secured a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm in January 2026, preferred to launch on the Layer 2 network Base.
HelloTrade: The trading startup opted to integrate into the Monad network, while other backed projects, such as Avon and Valhalla, shut down operations permanently.
Cap: The stablecoin project launched on the protocol in early 2026 is currently implementing a multichain deployment strategy.
This technological dispersion was facilitated by the accelerator’s initial policies. Program documentation details that MegaETH did not take equity, tokens, or governance rights in the participating companies. The protocol’s leadership based this decision on the belief that a policy free of corporate obligations would foster genuine alignment with its long-term technical vision.
Strategic refocus on native applications
Following the mainnet launch in February 2026, the issuance of its native token MEGA was executed in April 2026. This milestone was conditioned on the performance and deployment of at least ten accelerator applications within the network.
Starting this quarter, the organization will suspend plans for a third Mega Mafia cohort. Instead, the development team will redirect capital and technical efforts toward the creation of first-party applications.
According to the projections published by the team, this strategic pivot seeks to establish direct channels with end users to ensure that the value of technological development is captured entirely within the mainnet. Development priorities will focus on digital wallet infrastructure and the integration of its own stablecoin.
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