A group of DeFi projects and U.S. crypto exchange Kraken have donated $250,000 each to the Ethereum Foundation to support client teams working on the Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 upgrade.

On Aug. 24 the Ethereum Foundation announced that the donations were made by Kraken, Compound Grants, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap Grants. The funds will supplement the funding provided by the foundation earlier this year, to support Ethereum execution layer teams.

“Ethereum’s diverse client ecosystem is at the foundation of all that we’re building together. This includes both execution-layer and consensus-layer clients, both of which are essential parts of Ethereum’s post-merge future,” the announcement read.

The donations totaling $1.5 million will go to open-source developer teams including Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nimbus and Nethermind, who will provide “critical infrastructure for the network” post-merge of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 — which will see ETH’s transition from proof of work to a proof of stake mechanism.

Kraken CEO and co-founder Jesse Powell stated that the firm was proud to be “giving back to the courageous builders who are hard at work on the front lines of crypto innovation.”

According to Kraken, by July the exchange’s users had already staked 800,000 ETH in Eth2, worth $2.5 billion at current prices. At the time the platform stated it had distributed 25,300 ETH in rewards generated from client staking.

“This project represents an effort to secure Ethereum’s long-term growth, health and decentralization. Each of these elements can be exemplified by client diversity, strength of the teams themselves, and our confidence that Ethereum will continue to succeed as they succeed,” the announcement read.

Earlier this month the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade went live, which introduced a burning mechanism as part of its adjusted gas fee structure. At the time of writing, Etherscan data shows that there is currently 4.85 ETH worth roughly $15,300 being burned per minute.

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