Internet Capital Meets Onchain Apps: Live-Building with SpeedRun

Researcher(s)

Jayen Harrill

Date of Talk

Bio

Jayen Harrill leads marketing at Covalent, where she works on SpeedRun, the sub-second data co-processor, and ecosystem governance for onchain builders. She has been active in crypto since 2012 and having started on the community side, moving into marketing with a crypto security company, and currently advises early-stage teams outside of Covalent. Some highlights include milkcrate mining, breaking Telegram chat member limits, coordinating speaker selection at EthDenver, coordinating a rebrand, and hosting debates with core Ethereum Foundation researchers.

Abstract

Abstract: Streaming and short-form media have become the default way people publish, discover, and coordinate online. At the same time, Internet-native capital markets spin up and unwind narratives, tokens, and trades at a pace that looks much closer to a content feed than a traditional balance sheet. This talk connects those two trends and makes the case that onchain applications are starting to behave more like episodes in a stream than 10-year companies. Onchain apps are quickly launched for a specific narrative, trade, or micro-community, useful for a period of time, and then replaced by the next experiment.

We’ll introduce SpeedRun, Covalent’s prompt-based onchain app builder, as a practical laboratory for this shift. Instead of wrestling with boilerplate Solidity and infra, students can use natural language to deploy onchain projects to Base, wire in real-time data, and focus on mechanism design and user behavior. During the session, we’ll walk through several live, work-along builds: a payment or tipping flow using x402, a token or rewards flow with Clanker, a Base Mini App wired to live chain data, and a simple smart contract–driven primitive that encodes a rule or access condition.

Participants will leave with a concrete sense of why ephemeral apps are structurally aligned with always-on markets, and how a portfolio of small, shipped onchain experiments can be analogous to rapid-fire prototyping towards a sustainable project. The goal is to deploy contracts and live demos that students can extend after the session.

Beyond this we will introduce the Prompt Alchemist program that we are rolling out and would to see participation from students. Previous iterations of the Alchemist program was the stepping stone for many current colleagues in the crypto industry because it gave them direct industry experience.

External Link

Read the Research Paper

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm.


UBC Crest The official logo of the University of British Columbia. Urgent Message An exclamation mark in a speech bubble. Caret An arrowhead indicating direction. Arrow An arrow indicating direction. Arrow in Circle An arrow indicating direction. Arrow in Circle An arrow indicating direction. Bluesky The logo for the Bluesky social media service. Chats Two speech clouds. Facebook The logo for the Facebook social media service. Information The letter 'i' in a circle. Instagram The logo for the Instagram social media service. External Link An arrow entering a square. Linkedin The logo for the LinkedIn social media service. Location Pin A map location pin. Mail An envelope. Menu Three horizontal lines indicating a menu. Minus A minus sign. Telephone An antique telephone. Plus A plus symbol indicating more or the ability to add. Search A magnifying glass. Twitter The logo for the Twitter social media service. Youtube The logo for the YouTube video sharing service.