The field of blockchain research is moving towards enhancing privacy and security in various aspects of transactions and agreements. Recent developments focus on improving the confidentiality and verifiability of transactions, as well as the automation and enforceability of digital agreements. Researchers are exploring new protocols and methods to increase transactional privacy, such as coinjoin transactions and sealed-bid auctions, which aim to protect users' identities and prevent manipulation. Additionally, there is a growing interest in developing privacy-preserving ways to establish trust in confidential agreements, using techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs and secure two-party computation. Noteworthy papers include:

• A study on the analysis of input-output mappings in coinjoin transactions, which demonstrated a significant decrease in average post-mix anonymity set size.
• A proposal for a sealed-bid auction protocol using confidential compute blockchains, which provides security, privacy, and scalability without trusted third parties.
• An introduction to zk-agreements, a protocol that combines zero-knowledge proofs, secure two-party computation, and smart contracts to achieve both privacy preservation and computational enforceability.
• A decentralized exchange protocol that mitigates bribery attacks, providing a game-theoretically secure HTLC protocol resistant to all bribery scenarios.