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

中文翻译：

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初始加密资产产品（ICO）、代币化和公司治理

本文讨论了所谓的“初始代币发行”以及基于分布式账本技术（“DLT”）的几项发展对公司治理的潜在影响。虽然许多学术论文主要关注 DLT 和加密资产的法律资格，尤其是与后者作为证券/金融工具的潜在定义有关，但作者分析了一些基于 DLT 技术的用例及其潜力公司治理分析的重大变化。本文研究了新型公司利益相关者（即加密资产持有者）的出现对中小型企业（“SME”）以及上市公司治理的影响。自 2016 年初以来，一种新的融资方式已迅速成为金融科技创始人和金融监管机构面临的主要问题。通常被称为初始代币发行、初始代币发行（“ITO”）、代币生成事件（“TGE”）或简称为“代币销售”，我们在论文中使用术语初始加密资产发行（“ICO”），因为它比“初始代币发行”更有效地描述了可以创建的资产的广泛多样性，而且远远超出了支付工具的问题