South Korean tech giant LG Electronics is working with Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 network, to build a blockchain-based advertising platform designed to automate the buying and selling of digital ad inventory between advertisers and publishers.
The partnership targets a market worth $679 billion in global digital ad spend during 2025, which represented 68% of worldwide ad spending that year. Traditional ad networks rely on costly intermediaries to manage transactions between buyers and sellers. A blockchain-based alternative would eliminate middlemen and aim to increase efficiency while providing advertisers with greater transparency about ad reach.
Samuel Byungsun Park, head of LG Electronics’ blockchain research lab, said the company is assessing the model’s viability. “We are evaluating whether this approach can deliver meaningful value to advertisers, publishers and audiences,” Park stated.
Steven Goldfeder, Arbitrum co-founder, highlighted the automation advantage. “It means that you can basically run the market in an automated way in software. You don’t need manual intervention,” Goldfeder said.
LG has pursued crypto and blockchain initiatives for nearly a decade. In 2018, LG CNS, a subsidiary of LG Corporation, launched Monachain, a blockchain platform. The company later developed Wallypto, a crypto wallet that gained prominence during the 2022 NFT boom. LG also operated LG Art Lab, an NFT platform that allowed users to display digital artwork on their televisions. That platform shut down in June 2025, followed by the termination of the Wallypto wallet in September 2025.
The partnership announcement drove Arbitrum’s native token ARB up 5.44% on Thursday. LG and Arbitrum are exploring how to bring the advertising service to market this year, though neither company has disclosed a specific launch date or detailed technical specifications for the network.
Background
LG Electronics is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, as part of the broader LG Group. Arbitrum operates as a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, designed to increase transaction throughput and reduce costs for decentralized applications.
The ad tech sector has long grappled with opacity and inefficiency. Blockchain-based solutions aim to address these pain points by creating transparent, decentralized marketplaces where transactions can occur without intermediaries. LG’s entry into ad tech via blockchain represents an expansion of the company’s exploration into Web3 applications beyond consumer-facing products like wallets and NFT platforms.
What Remains Unclear
LG and Arbitrum have not disclosed whether the network will operate as a new blockchain or run entirely on Arbitrum’s layer-2. The companies also have not detailed specific technical architecture, regulatory compliance strategies across jurisdictions, or the precise problems the network aims to solve beyond general efficiency improvements.
