The field of blockchain research is moving towards improving the scalability, security, and efficiency of consensus protocols. Recent developments have focused on optimizing communication complexity, reducing latency, and increasing resilience to adversarial behavior. Notably, leaderless consensus protocols and parallelizable state replication approaches have shown promising results. Additionally, research on blockchain sharding and dynamic block size optimization has led to significant improvements in system performance and stability. Overall, these advancements are paving the way for more efficient, secure, and scalable blockchain systems. Noteworthy papers include: Ocior, which proposes a ultra-fast asynchronous leaderless consensus protocol with optimal performance in resilience, communication, computation, and round complexity. Mangrove, which introduces a novel scaling approach to building blockchains with parallel smart contract support. Near-Optimal Stability for Distributed Transaction Processing in Blockchain Sharding, which provides a distributed scheduler that guarantees stability under a near-optimal injection rate.