LG launches NFT gateway and marketplace for its smart TVs
LG Electronics Inc. jumped on the crypto bandwagon today with a new non-functional token platform for some of its smart TVs that allows viewers to “buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork” during the viewing experience.
The marketplace, called LG Art Lab, is only available in the US for LG TVs running webOS 5.0 or later. Users can access it by downloading the app to their TV’s home screen and get to buy and enjoy art NFTs.
The company said it would begin distributing digital artwork via “art drops” monthly through the marketplace starting September 22. The first will feature a set of metallic-looking NFTs from sculptor Barry X Ball.
Non-fungible tokens, also called NFTs, are a type of crypto-asset built using blockchain technology that represent the unique ownership of digital assets such as artwork, music, and even video game items. Using NFTs, it is possible to buy, sell and trade digital art and still maintain proof of ownership using NFTs, which due to their unique and tradable nature can have real value.
LG partnered with Hedera Hashgraph LLC to launch the platform and marketplace, a highly efficient provider of a blockchain alternative called “hashgraph”, which is not known for NFT use cases. Hedera boasts that hashgraph technology is highly secure and much more energy efficient than blockchain technology and in many cases 100 times faster than the most popular NFT blockchains such as Ethereum. However, Ethereum is about to cut energy costs by over 99% with its Merge update later this month.
As of May 2020, LG became a member of Hedera’s governing council along with a number of other major companies and is part of approving the roadmap for updates to the blockchain’s code base.
To use the platform, users will connect to Wallypto cryptocurrency wallets on their phones using a QR code from the smart TVs, which was developed by Hedera. Users must first purchase USD Coin, a stablecoin cryptocurrency that maintains parity with the US dollar, to purchase NFTs from their TVs.
LG’s NFT platform follows Samsung’s own foray into NFT artwork a few months after the electronics company also began integrating the technology into its own 2022 TV lineup in May with a partnership with Nifty Gateway.
