In this interview, Jack Saba discusses how blockchain can serve as foundational infrastructure across sectors, focusing on healthcare and supply chain use cases. He explains that emerging markets, still reliant on paper records, are eager to adopt blockchain for immutable, portable medical records, which would protect data against loss from disasters and enable seamless transfer for refugees. In the United States, the challenge lies in unifying disparate coding systems for treatments and medicines. Saba describes the evolution of blockchain investment: early funding targeted infrastructure tools (wallets, exchanges) to make the rigid Bitcoin network more usable, while current interest is in B2B enterprise solutions that reduce friction and cost in supply chains. He argues that permissioned (rather than fully private) chains are appropriate because most organizations lack vertical integration, and a shared network of databases allows multiple parties to read and write the same documents. As an early‑stage investor, Saba looks for startups that solve a clear problem, have a qualified team, and can implement solutions without excessive technical barriers. He notes challenges such as a limited pool of experienced entrepreneurs, revenue generation, and regulatory uncertainty. While regulations are still nascent, Saba highlights the potential for blockchain to embed compliance code, improve transparency, and enable real‑time audits, especially in emerging markets where it can curb corruption. Overall, the conversation paints blockchain as a promising, yet still early, infrastructure layer that can bring efficiency, security, and regulatory innovation to various industries.
Chapters
And so we talked about how emerging markets are kind of opening their arms to this technology and welcoming it in, playing with it. But in our use case here in the United States, do you see them in this healthcare system being open to it, or are they kind of pushing it away?
Yeah, I think that they're really open to it, because right now if we try to implement this, different areas have different codes. And I'm not talking about codes of regulations, I'm talking about codes of, he received this for treatment and he used this medicine. That medicine is not represented by the same code in every database. So you would have to unify everybody and get everyone on the same page, and that would be a really difficult process, and it will be a difficult process, but they'll get it done. But in emerging markets right now, everything is paper-based.
Mm-hmm.
So there's no infrastructure that is there for them to have to intertwine in. The fact that it's paper-based opens up to new security risks, and people lose records all the time. If there's war, if there's flood, if there's natural disaster, records get lost. People lose their records 2, 3, times over the course of their life. Whereas if they adopted this system, A, it would be easy to implement because they don't have anything they need to entwine with. You can set a standard and have everyone work with it. And you would have an immutable record of who you are. So say you're a refugee from a country and you're moving from where you are to a new place and you're moving to Canada, say, you could take your records with you. They could see everything that you've been treated for, everything that you've had. So they're really opening their arms to this innovation because they need it. Great.
So it sounds like a lot of this is still early stage. So as an investor in the blockchain, what sort of stuff are you looking at investing in, or where are you looking at investing in?
So it is really early days, and luckily for us, we get to kind of take some of the lessons learned from the earlier investors. In the early days, it was really about investing in the infrastructure, things to make it easy to work with. As we mentioned earlier, The Bitcoin network is really rigid and really strict, and it's really hard to adapt and leverage and use. And that was intentional because there were so many variables of this new technology, so they made it that way. So a lot of the early investments were about making it easier to work with, and companies that were doing that for wallets, exchanges, news, etc. Now we're seeing it hit more enterprise because what we're seeing is a lot of the companies failed because they didn't have revenue. And they didn't have these other things, and a lot of startups fail because they either can't raise money or they can't find a customer. So they fail because they don't have money. So right now what we're excited about is the blockchain as an infrastructure to create efficiencies for businesses. So where you can say, you know, this supply chain, right, your supply chain has high friction and there's low level— because of low levels of— your supply chain has high friction and high costs associated with it because of your system. We can provide a blockchain solution, so you should purchase it. So that is a B2B enterprise solution that someone would be interested in because it's going to save them time, it's going to save them money, it's going to save them a headache. So we're looking at it as an infrastructure where—
Would it be a private or permission-based chain?
I think that that would be a permission-based chain because a private chain you would need to have complete control over, so implementation would be really hard because unless you're Walmart or one of these really big institutions, your supply chain is not entirely vertically integrated. You don't have control over everything. So each actor on the network would have to adapt a node to be able to write and read and facilitate the document along the way. So that's— sorry, coming back to the point about with healthcare being a network of databases, one of the really great values of this, whether it be supply chain management or healthcare or financial institutions, whatever it is, by creating a network of databases, you are allowing multiple parties to read and write the same document.
And also, as an early investor, what sort of challenges are you facing, like personally and with your business?
So we are looking for real entrepreneurs, which is really difficult, because in the early days, there were a lot of tinkerers and hackers and really just technocrat enthusiasts that were building things for other blockchain enthusiasts. And so right now, the technology really exists in a very small number of hands. The blockchain community and proof of concepts from large institutions. It's really having a difficult time crossing into the real world. To that though, that's not a blanket statement about all startups, right? There are certain startups that are doing very well and have found their institutions that they're working with and they're generating revenue and they're moving. But if you look at the entire community, the technology is really rigid and hard to work with, which is stifling The development.
The community of blockchain.
Just if you wrapped everything up in the blockchain and you said, okay, we have Bitcoin over here, we have Ethereum over here, and within both of those you have companies that are working and developing everything. It's very much in its early days because it's hard to work with. The currencies that are associated with the chains are pretty volatile, and we're unsure of where the regulations are gonna head. So there's some uncertainty here, but there's a lot of potential. So we're trying to find the companies that have really ease of implementation. So when we're looking at stuff, The first thing we ask is, what problem are you solving? Why has this been unsolved before the invention of the blockchain? And then we try to dive into how hard is it for you to implement your solution and how much industry knowledge do you have in this industry? So are you a qualified team, etc., and moving forward.
You also mentioned there, real quick, regulations. So I'm guessing that because this is an emerging technology, there's all sorts of regulations around it. Or maybe it's missing right now and you see it coming out with more regulation, our government or governments of the world. What sort of red tape regulations do you see or are experiencing?
So the regulations haven't really— there are not a lot of regulations yet. But regulations exist to address inherent risks in business models and markets. So right now, New York said that if you're going to be using currency, you need to purchase a license. You need to go through and get a license. So each state is kind of regulating it differently, but a lot are taking a wait-and-see approach. They're trying to understand it before they regulate it because you don't want to regulate innovation out of the market because it's going to put you behind. So they're trying to understand what it is and then provide regulations on that. What's interesting is the more people learn about it, the more they want to take to it. So what this can do for government in itself is going to be amazing. So they don't want to regulate this out of existence because they want to see the innovations that can help them. One of the really cool things is that the transparency of the network, so you can follow the currency from where it's going to where it's supposed to be. Additionally, these tokens are just code, so you can code rules and regulations in. So if we are providing aid to an emerging market, we can regulate and dictate which vendors they can work with to ensure that the money is getting to where it's supposed to go, and we can watch it along the way to ensure that there's no corruption in the process. So if we're taking on an initiative in an emerging market and they are doing XYZ, these are the vendors they can work with, and we know that every dollar is being spent the way it's supposed to be spent. So they're excited about what it can do for value transfer and transparency, as well as voting and back office infrastructure. I mean, what this can do for cost savings in terms of auditing, like the SEC trying to audit the financial industry, this is going to provide the ability to do real-time audits, so not even quarterly or yearly audits. They will be able to call upon records and documents in ways that are guaranteed to be secure, so there's no worry about fraud or corruption associated with it, which isn't something we really think about in the United States, right? Like corruption of documents—
Not until recently.
No, I mean, but yeah, but even so, like, there's still good people within the system. It's not as though the interest and the checks and balances don't exist. In a lot of emerging markets, it's hard for people to work with them because they don't necessarily— there's a veil of corruption. Whether it's true for every individual or not, there's still this veil of it could happen. And the reason that it can happen is because they rely on central databases. So if you create a document, say you create a land title, for example, right? I bring a land title to you, you could put your name on it and then sell it off because it's a central database. So what this technology can do is distribute The network, distribute the validation of the documents and show an evolution of a document. So if you tried to create or corrupt a document that was added into any given bureaucracy, it would be invalidated and we could see who tried to do it.
