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.