polkadot VS solana

Polkadot (6400 GitHub Stars) https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot

I don't think asynchronous backing has any direct effect on the number of parachains, no (I mean, there likely is an effect, but it's not the goal and my understanding is that any effect on that would be minimal, although I'm not involved in the deep engineering here). It increases throughput, correct, by decreasing the time between blocks by not needing to do a "roundtrip" to the relay chain to build new blocks. See https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/issues/3779 for an overview.

"The 27 waiting day is unavoidable and a very important security measure to protect against certain attacks and vulnerabilities of PoS. I totally understand that it is annoying, but arguably it is for the benefit+security of the overall network, which includes you as well at the end of the day as DOT-holder." - from this GitHub discussion.

Ref: Kianenigma @ https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/issues/2418

Polkadot 0.9.37 has been released with MEDIUM upgrade priority. https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/releases/tag/v0.9.37

Specifically, it was this PR that changed it: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pull/6230

Actually it looks like you can! It's just not recommended. This is from the official documentation: "Starting with runtime version v23 natively included in the client version 0.8.23, payouts can go to any custom address. If you'd like to redirect payments to an account that is neither the controller nor the stash account, set one up. Note that setting an exchange address as the recipient of the staking rewards is extremely unsafe.*

A particular validator sent out a LOT of dispute reports (i.e., saying that other validators did something incorrectly) last night (for reasons unknown). It looks like other nodes "choked" reading all of these disputes, and one subsystem died, stalling nodes but NOT killing the process. It's still being investigated, but you can look at the issue on Github to see it being discussed here: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/issues/6412

Solana (9700 GitHub Stars) https://github.com/solana-labs/solana

EIP Core standards: Changes to Solana’s core code go through “feature gates” in the Solana repo. Yes, it’s much less organized than the EIP pages you are used to, and a headache to understand or keep up with. A cost of the speed of development, I’m told.

I visited the project on github (https://github.com/solana-labs/solana), and tried to get an overview of the ~800 open issues and ~100 open PRs.

Solana

With the introduction of new and advanced blockchain platforms in the Web 3.0 scene, the narrative around Ethereum has slowly shifted towards its younger “Ethereum Alternatives”. Solana, Avalanche, and MultiversX (former Elrond) are some of the crypto blockchains that are given this terminology, as they share similar features but are comparatively cheaper and better than Ethereum.

I understand this initiative is connected with Solana network [1] in some way?

[1] https://solana.com/

They do, actually: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/security/policy

Not sure I understand your question, but if you want the source code you can find it on github (https://github.com/solana-labs/solana)

Some topics that may be discussed in the next call include @ShinobiSystems Timely Vote Credits proposal (https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/blob/master/docs/src/proposals/timely-vote-credits.md), @elusivprivacy new built-in cryptographic operations to accelerate ZK verification (for privacy tech), and feature activation coordination standards.