by 
Don’t let the large glasses and silver hair fool you. Dr. Jane Thomason is a savvy proponent of Web3 and DeFi. Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, Jane’s encounter with blockchain came late in her career.
A successful entrepreneur, having founded and built a $250 million revenue consulting company, Jane, nevertheless, took a leap. “I spent most of my life working in developing countries, mainly in healthcare,” she told BlockSolid podcast host Yael Tamar on a recent episode. “I had a really good understanding of some of the challenges that [these countries] face around remoteness, isolation, lack of personnel, inability to send money, and all sorts of things like that. And in fact, my son told me in 2010 to buy Bitcoin.
“No, I didn’t do that. Or I probably wouldn’t be on this podcast,” she chuckles.
Jane sees blockchain as a tool for social change. “It took me a long time to understand why it was important to me. And then I had an epiphany,” she explains.” I was thinking about the [2004 Indian Ocean] tsunami and I realized that it wasn’t just that people were washed to sea anonymously. No one knew who the survivors were. No one knew who was in the hospital because all the identities were gone. The land records were gone. The health records were gone.
“If we can get blockchain operating at scale for humanitarian emergencies, then this can change the outcome not only in terms of people lost; but also in the reconstruction.”
The worldwide COVID pandemic was a true catalyst for change, according to Jane. With people stuck at home, even healthcare, an industry resistant to change, began to see the benefits of blockchain to underpin secure data sharing.
“All the developers and all the people who were building stuff, they didn’t go out to parties because they couldn’t. And so they really started building. That’s when we saw the explosion of DeFi.”
To hear some of Jane’s predictions about how Web3 and the metaverse will change the way health care is distributed and managed, listen to the full conversation here.
