A grouping of DeFi projects and U.Due south. crypto exchange Kraken have donated $250,000 each to the Ethereum Foundation to support client teams working on the Ethereum (ETH) two.0 upgrade.

On Aug. 24 the Ethereum Foundation appear that the donations were made by Kraken, Compound Grants, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap Grants. The funds volition supplement the funding provided by the foundation earlier this year, to back up 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'due south mail service-merge future," the annunciation read.

The donations totaling $1.five meg volition get to open-source developer teams including Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nimbus and Nethermind, who volition provide "critical infrastructure for the network" post-merge of ETH 1.0 and ETH ii.0 — which will see ETH's transition from proof of work to a proof of stake machinery.

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

Co-ordinate to Kraken, by July the commutation'southward users had already staked 800,000 ETH in Eth2, worth $2.5 billion at electric current prices. At the time the platform stated information technology had distributed 25,300 ETH in rewards generated from client staking.

Related: Eth2 staking contract ranks every bit unmarried-largest Ether hodler with $21.5B

"This project represents an attempt to secure Ethereum'south 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 keep to succeed equally they succeed," the announcement read.

Earlier this month the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade went live, which introduced a called-for mechanism equally 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.