On the Laravel News site there's a post detailing out some of the new things coming to Laravel 5.3 currently still in development but should be released in the near future.

Laravel 5.3 is currently in development and with all new Laravel releases, new features are being teased out as they are added. Here is a quick look at some of these new features.

The list of these new features includes:

• Eloquent Collections are cleanly serialized and re-pulled by queued jobs
• Queue console output changed to show the actual class names
• First Or Create [now takes additional values]
• Multiple Migration Paths

There's also a mention of the Laravel Echo functionality that makes in-app broadcasting simpler. For some of the topics there's links to other posts with more information too.