LG's Smart TVs Are About to Serve Ads From Their Own Blockchain 🍿

LG Electronics has developed a layer-2 blockchain network with Arbitrum to power a new platform for placing, buying, selling and managing digital advertisements, the South Korean consumer electronics giant told Fortune on June 11. The shared-ledger system is designed to give advertisers and publishers a common database of ad inventory and to record how audiences interact with each placement, with LG completing a pilot alongside an unnamed Japanese advertising agency through its in-house blockchain research lab. A decision on a full commercial rollout is under evaluation and expected later this year.

The addressable market is large. Dentsu estimated global digital ad spend at $679 billion in 2025, or 68% of worldwide ad spend, and has forecast digital ad spend of $740 billion in 2026, roughly 73% of a global media market set to top $1 trillion for the first time. A blockchain-based ad network would cut out intermediaries, aiming to make ad buys more efficient and provide transparency to advertisers about who their ads have reached. "It means that you can basically run the market in an automated way in software," Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder told Fortune. "You don't need manual intervention." Goldfeder separately cautioned that launching a chain is not a fit for every company: "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."

Samuel Byungsun Park, who leads LG Electronics' blockchain research department, framed the project in measured terms. "We are evaluating whether this approach can deliver meaningful value to advertisers, publishers and audiences," Park said. The new initiative leverages LG Ad Solutions, the company's advertising division that manages a global smart TV installed base of 216 million units, including 49 million in the United States.

Markets reacted modestly. Arbitrum (ARB) traded near $0.083 on Thursday, gaining about 5% to 5.44% in 24 hours on news of the partnership, which Arbitrum confirmed on X. The token remains down roughly 80% over the past year, per BeInCrypto data. LG's move fits a broader corporate shift toward owning dedicated ledger infrastructure, with Stripe incubating Tempo, a payments chain that raised $500 million, Robinhood working with Arbitrum on its own tokenized-equity chain, and Circle developing the Arc network.

LG's Web3 history is long and mixed. In 2018, LG CNS, a subsidiary of 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. LG shut down the Art Lab NFT marketplace in June 2025 and terminated Wallypto in September 2025, with the company having previously filed an NFT trading TV patent tied to its consumer device business.