MegaETH to End ‘Mega Mafia’ Accelerator After Two Years

MegaETH, an Ethereum scalability project, is shutting down its in-house accelerator program, Mega Mafia, after two years. The main reason is that most of the projects it incubated have left the MegaETH ecosystem.

Shuyao Kong, founder of MegaETH, confirmed the decision in an X post cited by The Block on July 16. “Mega Mafia was successful in many ways, but we concluded that the premise behind the program is no longer valid,” Kong wrote.

Mega Mafia was designed to identify and support teams building new applications on the MegaETH platform. Across two cohorts, it backed about 20 teams, which raised a combined $80 million from pre-seed through Series A.

Kong said only a small share of that success flowed back to MegaETH. “Mega Mafia was the best incubator of this cycle, but only a very small portion of the outcome accrued to MegaETH,” he wrote. Most of the projects the program helped develop are no longer building with the company, he added.

Several of Mega Mafia’s best-known projects have since moved to other platforms. Global Token Exchange, or GTE, announced plans to build its own chain. Noise, a social-media attention market platform, launched on Base after raising a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm. HelloTrade chose Monad, while some projects including Avon and Valhalla have effectively halted operations.

Kong also noted that MegaETH did not ask incubated startups for equity stakes or governance rights. The company wanted teams to genuinely share MegaETH’s vision and believe in its technology, he wrote.

MegaETH will now shift to building its own applications instead of running a third Mega Mafia cohort. Kong said the accelerator was effectively an indirect bet on other teams’ performance, while first-party apps create a direct relationship with end users and leave MegaETH fully accountable for the outcome.