It is an actual area of research, mostly around scalability. I don't know what happens in computer science departments, but you can watch Ethereum be developed

It is an actual area of research, mostly around scalability. I don't know what happens in computer science departments, but you can watch Ethereum be developed in the open. They cite the research they're implementing. For example: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/proto_danksharding_faq#How-%E2%80%9Ccomplicated%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cnew%E2%80%9D-is-KZG https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/proto_danksharding_faq#... I'm not quite smart enough to follow all the cryptography, but there are a lot of unsolved problems being worked on. It seems that doing trust and accounting at global decentralized scale is trickier than chaining blocks together.