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Real-Time Confirmation

NorthStar can confirm transactions in milliseconds — not by waiting for a global slot to elapse, but by treating the ER session as a single-tenant runtime where the operator controls the cadence.

Why a NorthStar session is real-time-capable

Three properties combine to make sub-perceptual confirmation feasible:

  1. Single-tenant execution. Each session runs in isolation. There is no cross-app contention, no shared mempool, no fork choice across competing forks. Block production cadence is a local parameter, not a network-wide consensus negotiation.

  2. Configurable slot duration. The validator's slot_duration_ms is a per-session knob — not the network-wide ~400ms Solana standard. Operators can run sessions at 10ms slots, 1ms slots, or any cadence the workload needs.

  3. processed = confirmed semantic equivalence. With one sequencer and no fork ambiguity, the moment a transaction lands in the ER's local order, it's also confirmed. Browser code can rely on processed commitment as the final state.

How sub-50ms confirmation works in practice

The confirmation pipeline:

  • TPU-direct submission — the SDK opens a QUIC connection to the validator's EphemeralTpu endpoint, bypassing the gateway forwarder.

  • Sub-slot wake-up — signatureSubscribe over WebSocket fires the moment the transaction lands. No polling, no slot-cadence delay.

  • Local-order finality — single-sequencer means the local ordering is the canonical ordering. processed commitment is sufficient.

End-to-end on the same machine as the validator, sub-50ms confirmation is reliable. On a separate machine over the public internet, latency floors at the network round-trip — typically 10–60ms depending on geography.

Tracking sub-millisecond claims

The marketing-grade "real-time" copy describes the mature platform's capability, not today's measured devnet path. The slot duration knob currently defaults to 400ms in deployed validators; per-session overrides + the SDK helper that wires up TPU-direct submission are tracked under the NorthStar project. Three deliverables:

  1. SDK helper — sdk.session.confirm({ tpuDirect: true }) — wraps QUIC submission + signatureSubscribe with one call.

  2. Bench v2 — slot-delta latency instrumentation, replaces the current t_send → blockTime measurement which is unreliable on the ER.

  3. Per-session slot duration — OpenSession accepts slot_duration_ms so each grid picks its cadence.

See also

PreviousER TopologyNextSecurity Model

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