Initial Crypto-asset Offerings (ICO), tokenization and corporate governance

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Stephane Blemus
  • Dominique Guegan
This interdisciplinary article discusses the potential consequences due to distributed ledger technology (DLT), tokenization as well as the emergence of new kinds of firm stakeholders, ie 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 issuing assets and 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 article the terminology initial crypto-asset offerings (ICO), as it describes more effectively than ‘initial coin offerings’ the vast diversity of assets (utility tokens, security tokens, crypto-currencies) that could be created and which goes far beyond the sole payment instrument issue.
Original languageEnglish
JournalCapital Markets Law Journal
Volume15
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)191-223
Number of pages32
ISSN1750-7219
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2020

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Law - Blockchain, Cryptoassets, Tokenization, Corporate governance

ID: 319114020