According to Foresight News, Polkadot's core developers are seeking to raise the network's current parallel chain limit to 100, with the goal of eventually adding 1,000 parallel chains through a planned software update called 'asynchronous support'. The update aims to reduce the block production time for parallel chains from 12 seconds to 6 seconds and increase the block space for each block by 5 to 10 times. Parity Technologies, a major contributor to Polkadot, announced at the sub0 developer conference in Lisbon that the asynchronous support version will be deployed to Polkadot's Rococo testnet in about two weeks, with the mainnet release schedule still tentative. Asynchronous support will also enable Polkadot's validator node count to more than double by the end of 2024, reaching around 1,000.