In this interview, Jack Saba discusses how blockchain technology is poised to leapfrog emerging markets due to regulatory openness, weak existing infrastructure, and a "clean slate" for innovation. He explains that regulators in many emerging economies are creating sandbox environments, allowing startups to experiment without the constraints of legacy rules, while more established economies risk stifling innovation with heavy regulation. Saba predicts that early‑adopting regions could become new economic powerhouses, outpacing traditional nations that are slower to embrace the technology. He then shifts to healthcare, describing blockchain as a network of databases that can store encrypted medical records with hash pointers on the chain. This would give patients control over their data, enable instant cross‑institution record retrieval, and facilitate selective data sharing for research while preserving privacy. Saba highlights the challenges of disparate coding standards in the U.S. and the paper‑based, fragile systems in many emerging markets, arguing that the latter present an ideal environment for blockchain‑based electronic medical records, even for refugees moving across borders.
Chapters
And then you mentioned this credit dream in Brazil. Do you see, and I know Day One Investments looks at emerging markets, the emerging markets, especially financially, taking to this technology first rather than the kind of more developed areas because of their emergingness or just because we're so established that it's harder for us to move over to something like this?
So, This is a really new technology, and the things that are going to stifle its potential are regulations and implementation. So right now, the regulations are— the regulatory ecosystem is really— we are unsure how this technology is going to be regulated, and we are a very heavily regulated country as well in the United States. But around Europe and Japan, They too are very heavily regulated. But the other thing is that they have very efficient infrastructures, right? Like the fact that it only takes 3 days for me to send money to you, it's a pain point, but it's not the end of the world. I can get the money to you and you're gonna be able to receive it. In emerging markets, what we're seeing is they don't have the same infrastructure that we have. And the regulation— the regulators wanna see this technology because they have had problems for so long that they need it solved and they need innovative solutions. So they're willing to bring in innovation. and work the regulations around what's going on. Additionally, a lot of emerging markets provide a clean slate for innovation. There's not a strong infrastructure that the blockchain would have to intertwine itself with in order to succeed. So what we in particular are doing is trying to find startups here in the United States that are working on problems and inefficiencies, and solving inefficiencies, and generally those same inefficiencies in emerging markets are really big problems. So this technology can have its starting point in emerging markets because the regulators want to see it, and there's a clean slate for innovation and strong need for it.
Yeah, and actually going total future vision here, do you see these emerging markets who adopt this technology early in the future of the world becoming more powerhouses than traditional established countries who take longer to adopt this technology, like perhaps some power switching?
I do, because regardless, I mean, we're out here in Silicon Valley, right? Our whole thing is about trying to disrupt established institutions, right? And if a leader of industry continues to innovate, they're very hard to disrupt. But when a leader of an industry does not innovate, they will no longer lead. So what's gonna happen is you're seeing pockets around the world right now where regulators are saying, hey, we're gonna create a sandbox. So we're not gonna apply the regulations that we have. We want your technology to come in. We're gonna work with it, you can do XYZ with it, and then we're gonna establish and understand what the lesson, what the inherent risks are with the new business models that this technology will create and create new regulations for them. So that's one approach, which is opening up and saying, hey, we wanna see this stuff, we wanna see this stuff succeed, so come on in. And then there's the other side of it where they're gonna say, we don't understand it, we don't wanna see it, we don't want anything to do with it, and they're gonna regulate it out. And so they're gonna be regulating out Potential for people to create new business models and for people to transfer value and create value in new ways. It would be as though, yeah, so I think that this technology will enable new regions to compete and be competitive. It would be as though some new areas really welcomed the internet and others are like, we don't want the internet. We don't want to see what happens with the internet. We don't want anything to do with it. We don't understand it. We don't want to spend the time to understand it. And then you had other smaller markets say, come on in, let's be innovative. What can this do for e-commerce? What can this do for social connectivity? What can this do for education? And those are the ones that would thrive. And so that's what we're seeing right now. There are gonna be people that open up their walls and their borders and they say, come on in, we wanna see what this can do for our people, let's work with you. And they're gonna be the ones that ultimately are able to compete in new ways.
Very interesting. So we also brought up healthcare. What are some uses of the blockchain around healthcare?
So, one of the challenges with talking about the blockchain right now is that we don't yet really have the verbiage to communicate what it is, right? Like in the early '90s, the internet was just for email because that's all we could understand. So, we don't have the verbiage to communicate what it is. And the other thing is, it's a lot of different things. So, in finance, it's a way to transfer value as part of it. In healthcare, the blockchain is gonna be a network of databases.
Okay.
So right now we have databases and that's where information lives in siloed, and then we have networks where you can get on the web and you can access information different places. So this technology is gonna enable a network of databases. So what could happen and what will happen is that they will create— someone was gonna create an electronic medical record system that leverages the power of the blockchain. And what that looks like is 3 levels. So there's the application level where if you're my doctor, I come in, I answer questions, you load the information. That information is stored in database, in our local database and encrypted. And then hashes are added to the blockchain, which is just a pointer. So if you— if we had this now, if we have had this for a really long time and up until the point that we're at now, and I walked into a hospital and I walked into the ER for the first time where I've never been, what I could do is pull all my records from all of the healthcare institutions I've ever been to, my primary care doctor, my childcare doctor, different hospitals that I've been at. I could call upon all those hashes, the pointers to their databases. And pull all the records right there and provide the doctor that I had never seen before a full history of who I am as a patient.
How does that work right now? Do you know?
In the current healthcare system?
Yeah.
Everything lives locally. And then we have to apply— they have to— they have secure channels of providing information. And it has to be done through request. So if I go into a new doctor— I recently signed up with a hospital around here, a doctor office around here. And they had to get the records from my places back in New Hampshire. Which I had to fill out the information and say, hey, I give you permission to contact my doctor. My doctor had to say, hey, is this true? And then they provided the records back. And that took about a week or so. Whereas this puts the power in my hand. It says, I want to provide the— I'm going to give you permission to access my records because I'm in control of my records. You're the doctor that I'm seeing. Here is the information that you need. So it takes the control out of the centralized systems that we have and it puts it in the people. What's really interesting is that since the records will be yours, you can then do what you want with them. So if there were a study down at Stanford going on about a correlation between 2 diseases, and they're trying to figure out what the best cure is, and they needed just large amounts of data to run through their AI, they could put a call out there and say, hey, we need medical records. And what I could do is I could say, I'm gonna provide certain information. So you can see that I am a male between the ages of 20 and 25. That I've lived in these locations, I've had these preexisting conditions, and this is what I'm being treated for right now. And they wouldn't need any other information. They wouldn't need to know what kind of glasses I wear and what those records say. They wouldn't need to know about other infections that they're not caring about. So I can permission to them only the information that they need, which is really exciting.
And so we talked about how emerging markets are kind of opening their arms to this technology and welcoming it in, playing with it. 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 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. 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 intertwine 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.
