The field of blockchain consensus protocols is moving towards faster, more reliable, and scalable solutions. Researchers are exploring new approaches to improve the performance and security of these protocols, including the use of software-defined networking (SDN) and novel consensus algorithms. One notable trend is the development of protocols that can achieve high throughput and low latency while maintaining security and fault tolerance. Another area of focus is the analysis of existing protocols, such as Tendermint, to formally prove their safety and termination properties. Noteworthy papers include: BlockSDN-VC, which presents a SDN-based transaction broadcast framework that reduces median latency by up to 62%. Universally Composable Termination Analysis of Tendermint, which provides a formal analysis of the Tendermint protocol's safety and termination properties. Odontoceti, which introduces a ultra-fast DAG consensus protocol that achieves commitment in just two communication rounds. QScale, which proposes a probabilistic chained consensus protocol for moderate-scale systems with sub-linear communication complexity per process.