High level summary
The Consensus team implemented and tested a patch that does not propagate future headers.
It is under review, and we expect it can be released in the next Cardano node version.
On the UTxO-HD front, we finished prototyping the LedgerDB and BackingStore redesign, which is required for the LSM-tree integration and might help us implement a more resource efficient in-memory backend.
With this prototype finished we can start integrating the rest of the code.
We investigated the unexpected performance degradation observed when acquiring the block context.
We also released Cardano node 8.7.0 and moved tree-diff outside cardano-ledger libraries.