From our point of view, yesterday's ACDC decision on EIP-8025 was the wrong call for Ethereum's long-term interests. EIP-8025 proposes optional execution proofs, a first step toward the zkEVM roadmap, and the client teams declined to commit to it. Framing the proposal as an "optional feature" may have worked against it. Calling something optional makes it easy to dismiss as low priority. To be clear, it was a proposal, and proposals can be accepted or rejected; nothing obligated anyone to approve it. And it is true that this feature does not inherently require a hard fork. But that is precisely what makes the question of commitment unavoidable: with nothing at the protocol level forcing the work to happen, progress depends entirely on whether people are actually assigned to it. Execution proofs only become real if client developers implement them, if testing teams build the coverage they need, and if DevOps keeps the infrastructure running. Declining to prioritize the proposal means the work simply does not happen. The optionality was meant for operators, those choosing whether to enable execution proofs, not for the people deciding whether the work happens at all. Operators should be able to opt in regardless of which client they run, and a decision taken without all teams present cannot credibly settle a question that depends on all teams delivering. Optional proofs are the foundation of Ethereum's zkEVM roadmap. That roadmap is complex, and it demands extensive integration and testing across teams. Getting there requires a shared, sustained commitment. We need to test under realistic conditions and investigate failures before consensus depends on proofs, and that work should proceed alongside research into mandatory proofs. Every integration bug we uncover now is one we won't be discovering after consensus depends on it. The more groundwork we lay today, the more bandwidth we have later for the challenges specific to mandatory proofs, including the ones we haven't found yet.