Ethereum Foundation Grant
Today, Ethereum stands as a cornerstone of the crypto ecosystem: a programmable base layer for general-purpose smart contracts across finance, gaming, identity, and supply-chain use cases; the source of de facto standards for tokens and NFTs; the anchor of the largest DeFi and stablecoin networks; and — via proof-of-stake — a neutral settlement layer that secures thousands of applications. Although no longer fragile, the Ethereum ecosystem is not yet mature and benefits from continued contributions. To that end, the Ethereum Foundation funds free and open-source projects, especially builder tools, core infrastructure, research, community resources, and other public goods. From 2021 to 2024, it funded 1,708 projects, totaling $162.4 million.
The 2025 Academic Grants Round of the Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a new wave of awards to advance Ethereum-related research. Among the awardees is zkFuzz, a project by Prof. Maria Christakis, PhD student Christoph Hochrainer (TU Wien), and Valentin Wüstholz (ConsenSys Diligence). The project develops automated testing techniques to improve the reliability and security of zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) — a critical building block for blockchain scaling and privacy-preserving applications. A zkVM lets you prove a program ran correctly without revealing private inputs or requiring everyone else to re-run it, so others can verify results quickly and cheaply. Because this trust hinges on correct tooling, even subtle logic bugs in ZK pipelines can cause severe financial and security incidents. To mitigate this, zkFuzz pioneers metamorphic, fuzzing-based methods to uncover such bugs automatically, strengthening the foundations of next-generation decentralized technologies.
Related research from the team introduced Circuzz, the first systematic fuzzer for ZK circuit-processing pipelines, which uses metamorphic test oracles to detect critical logic bugs. Applied to four distinct pipelines, Circuzz uncovered 16 logic errors, 15 of which have already been fixed by maintainers. Further reading: Fuzzing Processing Pipelines for Zero-Knowledge Circuits — presented at ACM CCS 2025 in October by Christoph Hochrainer, Anastasia Isychev, Valentin Wüstholz, and Maria Christakis (TU Wien / ConsenSys).