• Amorphous carbon anodes face a trade-off between high plateau capacity and high plateau potential, leading to sodium metal deposition and safety risks during fast charging.
• The plateau sodium storage kinetics are governed by four elementary steps: liquid-phase diffusion, interfacial transport, charge transfer, and solid-state diffusion, with the rate-limiting step being the desolvation process at the electrode–electrolyte interface.
• Strategies to enhance plateau kinetics include optimizing the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) composition and structure, and engineering the carbon microstructure (e.g., pore size, surface chemistry, and graphitic ordering) to lower desolvation energy and improve sodium ion transport.
• Achieving high energy density and fast charging simultaneously requires a balance between extending the low-potential plateau and maintaining a sufficiently high plateau potential to avoid sodium plating, which can be addressed by rational design of carbon materials and electrolyte formulations.