Planet Microcap Podcast | Microcap Investing Strategies

My guest on the show today is Jacob Stephan, Senior Research Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets. He recently authored a “Crypto Industry” white paper, and I invited him on to break it down. In this episode, Jacob lays out why digital assets have crossed into institutional viability—a “normalization phase” driven by clearer regulation, enterprise-grade infrastructure, and real corporate adoption. We discuss the internet-style adoption curve (crypto at ~7% global penetration), why regulation is the cornerstone of investability (FIT 21 progress, the new FASB fair-value accounting, and pending clarity in the U.S.), and how stablecoins—“dollars with an API”—are emerging as the killer app with multi-trillion settlement volumes. Jacob walks through concrete examples from Visa, Mastercard, and JPMorgan moving beyond pilots to on-chain settlement, and contrasts stablecoins’ payment utility with Bitcoin’s treasury/“digital gold” role. We also cover the nuanced risks: centralization at the access layer (custody, clo