LG Taps Arbitrum to Put the $679B Ad Market On-Chain, Because Spreadsheets Weren't Cutting It

South Korean tech giant LG Electronics is working with the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum to build a blockchain-based advertising network aimed at serving the digital ad industry. Arbitrum would give advertisers and publishers a shared database of ad inventory and track how customers interact with advertisements, with the company exploring how to bring the service to market later this year, Fortune reported on Thursday.

Digital ad spend is estimated to have reached $679 billion in 2025, making up 68% of worldwide ad spend, according to global advertising giant Dentsu. A separate Dentsu forecast cited by BeInCrypto projects digital ad spend at $740 billion in 2026, about 73% of a global media market set to top $1 trillion for the first time. Traditional ad networks rely on costly intermediaries to automate and manage the buying and selling of ad space between advertisers and publishers, a process the partners say a shared ledger could streamline.

LG developed the project through its dedicated blockchain research lab, which piloted the system with an unnamed Japanese ad agency. "We are evaluating whether this approach can deliver meaningful value to advertisers, publishers and audiences," said Samuel Byungsun Park, the head of LG Electronics' blockchain research lab. Arbitrum cofounder Steven Goldfeder said the design can run ad transactions with limited manual intervention. "It means that you can basically run the market in an automated way in software," Goldfeder told Fortune. "You don't need manual intervention." Goldfeder also cautioned that operating a dedicated chain is not a fit for every company, saying, "I am very opinionated when someone asks me, 'Should I launch a blockchain?' For many people, the answer is yes, but probably for most people, the answer is no."

The price of Arbitrum (ARB) gained 5.44% on Thursday following the announcement, which Arbitrum confirmed on X, with a separate report noting a double-digit intraday gain at one point. ARB traded near $0.083 on Thursday, up 5% in 24 hours yet down 80% over the past year. LG joins a growing list of firms building their own ledgers rather than renting block space, a group that includes Stripe-incubated payments chain Tempo, which raised $500 million, Robinhood, which is working with Arbitrum on its own tokenized-equity chain, and Circle, which is developing the Arc network.

LG has explored crypto and Web3 products for nearly a decade. In 2018, LG CNS, a subsidiary of the LG Corporation, launched an in-house blockchain called "Monachain" aimed at businesses for digital authentication, payments and supply chain management. LG Electronics later developed a decentralized crypto wallet called Wallypto using the Hedera Hashgraph network at the height of the 2022 NFT boom, serving as a companion wallet for the LG Art Lab NFT platform that allowed users to display digital artwork on TVs. The NFT platform was shut down in June 2025, and LG Electronics terminated Wallypto a few months later in September.