A South Korean tech giant wants to put ads on chain. LG Electronics, which makes TVs, laptops, and a slew of other consumer devices, is building out a blockchain-based network designed for advertising, the company told Fortune. The firm has its own dedicated blockchain research lab and piloted the project with an unnamed Japanese ad agency.
The new platform provides advertisers and publishers with a shared database of ad inventory and records how customers have interacted with the advertisements. LG Electronics worked with Arbitrum, a so-called layer-2 protocol on top of Ethereum, to develop its own blockchain. The collaboration resulted in LG building its own layer-2 network, which provides a low-cost means of batching transactions. The company will explore how to bring the ad platform to market later this year.
“We are evaluating whether this approach can deliver meaningful value to advertisers, publishers and audiences,” Samuel Byungsun Park, leader of LG Electronics’ blockchain research department, said in a statement.
Arbitrum’s cofounder, Steven Goldfeder, added that the new ad platform can help make the process of selling advertisements more efficient. “It means that you can basically run the market in an automated way in software,” he said. “You don’t need manual interventions.”
Corporate blockchains
Over the past decade, corporations have largely avoided creating their own blockchains. Still, amid a more friendly regulatory environment for crypto in the U.S., big companies have shown a greater willingness to do so. The fintech giant Stripe worked with the venture outfit Paradigm to develop a high-speed blockchain called Tempo. The stablecoin issuer Circle is working on Arc, its own decentralized ledger. And the online brokerage Robinhood is working with Arbitrum to launch its own chain for tokenized equities, or stocks in blockchain wrappers.
The strategy comes as corporations like Stripe try to own every layer of the crypto tech stack—from the blockchains that support applications to the applications themselves. Even JPMorgan Chase has its own blockchain unit that uses its own private version of a decentralized database.
Still, that doesn’t mean every Fortune 500 company should create its own ledger. “I am very opinionated when someone asks me, ‘Should I launch a blockchain?’” said Goldfeder. “For many people, the answer is yes, but probably for most people, the answer is no.”
