# Introduction

North Star is Sonic SVM's session-layer scaling protocol. It enables **fully on-chain applications** — games processing millions of transactions per second, orderbooks matching trades in <50ms, real-time multiplayer with zero gas — running on top of Sonic SVM with full Solana composability.

Sonic SVM provides a high-performance, gaming-focused SVM execution environment as a persistent L2 on Solana. North Star extends this further: for workloads that demand **dedicated, burst-speed compute** for a bounded session, North Star provisions an Ephemeral Rollup — a short-lived SVM runtime co-located with Sonic SVM. When the session ends, state settles back to Sonic SVM and the ER disappears.

Think of it as on-demand overdrive for your Sonic SVM application.

> **Target performance:** >1M TPS per rollup instance, <50ms transaction confirmation, \~30s checkpoint intervals, challenge resolution in minutes (not hours or weeks).