MegaETH shuts down the Mega Mafia accelerator, and successful applications leave

MegaETH shuts down the Mega Mafia accelerator, turning resources to first-party applications

Summary

MegaETH officially shuts down its Mega Mafia accelerator project after two years of operation. Officials said that although the project helped the start-up team raise a large amount of money, it failed to retain enough value for its own ecology. MegaETH decided to end the program after most of the successfully incubated applications were no longer built on its blockchain network.

Accelerator has opened two phases, supported about 20 teams, and raised a total of about US$80 million from investors. In the future, MegaETH will shift funds to first-party consumer applications and products built specifically for its infrastructure.

Shuyao Kong, a member of the core team, said on the X platform that most of the successful applications supported by the program are no longer built based on MegaETH. The accelerator supports approximately 20 teams in two phases, which have raised approximately US$80 million in cumulative funding from seed to Series A. MegaETH selection team works closely with core developers and provides technical, management and market-making support. But the network does not hold equity, governance or ownership of these projects.

Kong said MegaETH initially believed that the founders would align their goals with the network without formal ownership arrangements. This idea did lead to successful startups, but many teams later chose different technology routes. "Only a very small amount of this value returns to Mega," she wrote, announcing that there will be no more batches of Mega Mafia 3.0.

The following is a summary of her reflection and follow-up plans:

"After establishing MegaMafia in the past two years, we decided to end the program. Although it has been successful in many ways, we believe the premise on which the plan was based no longer holds true. Here are some thoughts and the next direction..."

Multiple projects demonstrate changes in this model. The Global Token Exchange (GTE) decided to build its own public chain after participating in the first phase of the accelerator. The social attention market Noise later moved to Base, while HelloTrade moved to Monad. At the same time, although the stablecoin project Cap was launched on MegaETH, a broader multi-chain strategy has been implemented.

This decision comes only a few months after the Mega Mafia app helped MegaETH reach key network milestones. On April 30, MegaETH launched the MEGA token after 10 ecosystem applications reached the first performance target required to trigger a token generation event. This milestone connects accelerators directly to the network's early growth strategies.

Since then, MegaETH has expanded the economic system around its blockchain. In May, the MegaETH Foundation launched a MEGA token repurchase program funded by net income generated by USDm stablecoin issuers. This mechanism connects stablecoin activities with regular token purchases and simultaneously promotes the development of MegaETH high-speed chain applications.

However, shutting down Mega Mafia changed the way teams build future needs. Kong said MegaETH will focus its resources on "OMEGA" applications-products designed around what the team believes are unique to MegaETH. The network also plans to invest more directly in first-party consumer applications.

Under the new strategy, MegaETH expects to build relationships directly with users, rather than relying mainly on independent startups to create products and ultimately give back value to the network. Kong pointed out that first-party development will also place teams more accountable for product results.

This change occurred after Mega Mafia played a central role in MegaETH's transition from development to main-network activities and the issuance of MEGA tokens. Today, the network is testing whether it can keep users, activities and economic value more closely within its core ecosystem by building more consumer-facing products on its own.