The field of fault-tolerant distributed systems is moving towards designing more resilient and efficient protocols. Researchers are exploring novel techniques to enhance the robustness of distributed estimators and consensus protocols, with a focus on relaxing connectivity constraints and reducing communication loads. One notable direction is the development of signature-free reliable broadcast protocols that can tolerate Byzantine faults and achieve termination in just 2 steps under certain optimistic conditions. Another area of focus is the characterization of necessary and sufficient conditions for implementing atomic registers and consensus under arbitrary patterns of process-channel failures. Noteworthy papers include: Optimistic, Signature-Free Reliable Broadcast and Its Applications, which proposes an optimistic RBC protocol that achieves termination in 2 steps and integrates it into a new signature-free, post-quantum secure DAG-based Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol. Tight Bounds on Channel Reliability via Generalized Quorum Systems, which introduces generalized quorum systems to characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for implementing atomic registers and consensus under arbitrary patterns of process-channel failures.