We’re delighted to announce that Maria Christakis’ project zkFuzz, has been selected for funding by the Ethereum Foundation under the 2025 Academic Grants Round!

Together with PhD student Christoph Hochrainer, and in collaboration with Valentin Wüstholz (Consensys Diligence), she will develop testing techniques to improve the reliability and security of zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs). zkVMs are a key building block for scaling blockchain systems and enabling privacy-preserving applications, but even subtle logic errors in these systems can have severe financial and security consequences. By pioneering new methods to automatically uncover such errors, this project strengthens the foundations of next-generation decentralized technologies.

The Ethereum Foundation, a leading global organization dedicated to supporting research and development for the Ethereum ecosystem, awards highly competitive grants that shape the future of blockchain and decentralized technologies. Their support underscores the international significance of this research and TU Wien’s role at the forefront of advancing trustworthy digital infrastructures.

Congratulations to Maria, Christoph, and Valentin on this outstanding achievement!

Curious? Find out more about Maria and her research in our #5QW interview series.

About

Maria Christakis is Professor and Head of the Research Unit Software Engineering at TU Wien Informatics. Her research aims to develop theoretical foundations and practical tools for building more reliable and usable software and increasing developer productivity. Maria is particularly interested in investigating automatic test generation, program analysis, and software verification topics. Before joining TU Wien, she did research at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the University of Kent, Microsoft Research in the US, and ETH Zurich.

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