The coming BCH upgrade is in one week already, but let's think forward and discuss the one after that to see the ideas for one year for now!

first of all some links about the upcoming May 15th upgrade: article by Bitcoin.com https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-slated-for-may-15-upgrade-to-bring-improvements-for-users-and-merchants/

video explaining in depth what's happening: https://youtu.be/NO4PH0FipYM

What I've heard floating around for next year are ideas related to the smart contract capabilities of BCH. General Protocols wrote a great article on 5 obscure and relatively easy to fix limits of the Bitcoin Cash scripting system. https://read.cash/@GeneralProtocols/raising-the-bar-on-bitcoin-cash-upgrades-ae04238f#appendix-what-kind-of-limits-does-bch-scripting-have

These make it very hard to develop useful smart contract applications for BCH or even impossible because of constraining limits. Raising the limits should be easy (after testing that it is safe ofcourse) but BCH is also missing multiplication, a unified number encoding and native introspection.

It would be ideal for BCH to get a thriving developer ecosystem but it's still too hard and too complicated.

There are two main proposals, which are not mutually exclusive , to add miner validated tokens to BCH. One is Group - a proposal for a hardcoded token standard- and the other is Cashtokens in the form of a third transaction format (also called pmv3) which allows everyone to develop their own tokenstandard akin to ETHs ERC standards. Just like for ETH smart contracts and tokens go hand in hand. SLP tokens are awesome but can't be used in smart contracts because they are not miner validated.

The third transaction format proposal has the advatage of combining the previously mentioned unified integer format with a simple and elegant tokensolution and cleaning up the wasted space in transactions and making them more efficient. Apparently there's even an obscure problem for developers with malleable transaction parts still that it would solve to remove as many headaches from developers as possible - this is how we get a thriving application space.

Very interested to hear what other people see as being planned & worked on for the next upgrade, or some things others really want to see!