  This paper discusses the potential impacts of the so-called `initial coin
offerings', and of several developments based on distributed ledger technology
(`DLT'), on corporate governance. While many academic papers focus mainly on
the legal qualification of DLT and crypto-assets, and most notably in relation
to the potential definition of the latter as securities/financial instruments,
the authors analyze some of the use cases based on DLT technology and their
potential for significant changes of the corporate governance analyses. This
article studies the consequences due to the emergence of new kinds of firm
stakeholders, i.e. the crypto-assets holders, on the governance of small and
medium-sized enterprises (`SMEs') as well as of publicly traded companies.
Since early 2016, a new way of raising funds has rapidly emerged as a major
issue for FinTech founders and financial regulators. Frequently referred to as
initial coin offerings, Initial Token Offerings (`ITO'), Token Generation
Events (`TGE') or simply `token sales', we use in our paper the terminology
Initial Crypto-asset Offerings (`ICO'), as it describes more effectively than
`initial coin offerings' the vast diversity of assets that could be created and
which goes far beyond the payment instrument issue.
