statemint VS polkadot

-Parachains are individual layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel on Polkadot, connected to the Polkadot Relay Chain and secured by its validator set. Any type of data or assets can be sent between Parachains. Parachains connect to the Relay Chain by leasing a parachain slot via auctions, by being granted a slot by Polkadot governance as a common good chain (Parachain slots reserved for functionality that benefits the ecosystem as a whole. Such as Statemint) Statemint or by connecting as a parathread (An idea for parachains to temporarily participate in Polkadot security without needing to lease a dedicated parachain slot by economically sharing the resource of a parachain slot.) Parachains can also connect to external networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum using cross-network bridges.

If you are interested in Statemine (the first common good parachain which will run on Kusama), you can check out the Github repo here (Statemine is just the name of the Kusama version of Statemint): https://github.com/paritytech/statemint

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