Ephemeral Rollups

Learn about Ephemeral Rollups and how they enable low-latency, composable applications on Solana

Ephemeral Rollups (ERs) are a scaling solution for Solana that enable low-latency, composable applications and games. They work by temporarily delegating account ownership to a specialized validator that can process transactions with minimal latency while maintaining composability with the base layer.

What are Ephemeral Rollups?

Ephemeral Rollups provide a temporary execution environment where delegated accounts can be modified with extremely low latency (typically under 100ms). Unlike traditional rollups, Ephemeral Rollups are:

• Low-latency: Transactions execute in milliseconds rather than seconds
• Composable: Accounts remain accessible and can interact with base layer programs
• Temporary: Accounts are delegated for a specific period and then returned to the base layer
• Automatic: State commits to the base layer at configurable intervals

Read more about Ephemeral Rollups in the official documentation.

How Ephemeral Rollups work

The Ephemeral Rollups flow consists of three main phases:

Architecture diagram

The flow of an Ephemeral Rollup session:

Base Layer (Solana)          Ephemeral Rollup
─────────────────           ──────────────────

1. Account PDA
   │
   │ Delegate → 
   │                          2. Account PDA (delegated)
   │                             │
   │                             │ Fast transactions
   │                             │ (50-100ms)
   │                             │
   │ ← Commit (automatic)        │
   │   every commit_frequency_ms │
   │                             │
3. Account PDA ← Undelegate   ←─┘
   (final state)

Key benefits

• Sub-100ms latency: Transactions execute in milliseconds instead of seconds
• Same developer experience: Use existing Solana programs and tools
• Composability: Interact with base layer accounts and programs
• Cost efficient: Reduce transaction costs for high-frequency operations
• Automatic state sync: Configure commit intervals to balance latency and finality

Examples that use Ephemeral Rollups

All examples in this repository demonstrate Ephemeral Rollups:

• Anchor Counter - Simple counter with Anchor framework
• Rust Counter - Native Rust implementation
• Bolt Counter - Using the Bolt ECS framework
• Crank Counter - Scheduled automatic execution
• Session Keys - Temporary signing keys with ERs
• Token Transfer - Token operations on ERs

Next steps

Account delegation

Learn how to delegate accounts to Ephemeral Rollups

Transaction execution

Understand how to execute transactions in ERs