The Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced that over $2.46 million in grants will be given to finance Ethereum 2.0 development.

In a post published on the official blog on Aug. 26, EF announced that it has “granted financial awards to various client development teams. The teams in question are tasked with creating Test Networks (testnets) compatible with multiple clients as the first phase of development approaches.

The funds will go to nine companies and researchers. Many companies received funding for client development, such as Harmony which has been awarded $189,000 for the Prysm client Sigma Prime; $485,000 for Lighthouse; Consensys co-founded startup Sigma Prime obtained $485,000 for its Lighthouse client, while Status received $500,000 for the Nimbus client. Status has also received $150,000 for networking protocol development, while Whiteblock received $184,000 for network testing and testnet/interoperability support.

Crypto analyst Dmitry Khovratovich received $10,000 to produce a report regarding the security of some aspects of the first version of ETH 2.0 and Chainsafe received $217,500 for developing its Lodestar light client and javascript.

The post also states that there are more awards available for other companies. EF has allocated 5 ether (ETH) bounties (or 1,000 units of USD-pegged decentralized stablecoin DAI) for recommendations that make it into the Phase 0 Ethereum 2.0 spec before the chain is launched.

A series of bounties have been set aside for research on the Legendre pseudo-random function which is slated to be a part of the upcoming proof of custody. Lastly, the foundation also intends to award the winners of the STARK-friendly hash challenge, which aims to evaluate the security of current STARK-friendly hash functions.

The first stage of the Ethereum network’s transition to Ethereum 2.0 is expected to take place on January 3, 2020.

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