Introduction

A programmable Ephemeral Rollup platform on Sonic SVM.

NorthStar is a programmable Ephemeral Rollup (ER) platform on Sonic SVM. It lets a developer carve out a single-tenant, isolated runtime — a session — anchored to Solana L1, run logic at custom slot cadence inside it, and atomically settle state back to L1 when the session closes.

Same Solana programs. Same SDK shapes. Different latency, different fee policy, different blast radius.

What problem does it solve

A single global blockchain is a bad fit for workloads that need:

• Sub-50ms confirmation — agents reasoning faster than human perception, market makers responding to mid-quote shifts, real-time games.

• Per-app fee economics — gasless reads for end users, custom fee schedules for high-frequency strategies, MEV-aware policies.

• Isolated execution boundaries — one tenant's congestion can't slow another's confirmations.

Today's options force a choice between L1 (general, secure, slow, fixed fee policy) and an offchain server (fast, but you've left the trust model behind). NorthStar splits the difference: an L1-anchored, single-tenant runtime that inherits Solana's security and gives the operator the dials.

What you actually get

A session is a bounded execution context with five properties the operator chooses:

Knob	What it controls
Grid id	Identifier; one session per (owner, grid_id)
TTL	Maximum lifespan in slots before forced settlement
Fee cap	Lamport budget for internal accounting
Fee structure	The schedule that prices instructions inside the session
Delegated accounts	The state the session is allowed to write

Inside the session, transactions execute against a private Solana validator, with confirmation at the operator's chosen slot cadence (current devnet default: 400ms; the path to 10ms is in the Real-time confirmation docs). Outside the session, those same accounts are locked on L1 — no transaction signed by anyone, including the original owner, can mutate them until the session closes. When it does, every change settles back atomically.

Who it's for

• dApp developers who already ship Solana programs and want isolation, custom cadence, or programmable economics for a specific surface (orderbook, AMM, agent harness) without rewriting their stack.

• Agent builders running model-driven trading or coordination loops where end-to-end latency dominates and global slot cadence is a tax.

• Protocol designers who want application-specific MEV policies, custom fee curves, or tenant isolation as first-class primitives.

If you've shipped a Solana program before, the SDK is the same shape you already know. If you haven't, Hello World is ~30 lines.

Where to start

If you want to...	Read
See it work end-to-end in 5 minutes	Hello World
Understand the formal model	Sessions, Account delegation
Understand how it's wired	ER topology
Understand the trust model	Security model
Migrate an existing Solana program	Migrate to NorthStar
Look up Portal program instructions	Portal program reference

What this isn't

• Not a sidechain. State lives on Solana L1 throughout. The ER is execution-only; settlement is L1-native.

• Not multi-tenant. A session is single-tenant by design — that's the property that makes the cadence + economics knobs safe.

• Not a general L2. It's purpose-built for short-lived, application-scoped sessions. Long-running shared state belongs on L1.

Status

NorthStar is live on Sonic Devnet (the Sonic L1 surface anchored to Solana Devnet). The platform is feature-complete for single-owner sessions; per-user isolation, real-time slot overrides, and the formal challenge protocol are tracked under the public Linear roadmap. The litepaper covers the formal model and the path to mainnet.