NFTs Will Be Available On LGs Smart TVs

Not content to rest on its laurels for long, LG announced that it will add support for non-transactional tokens (NFTs) to its smart TV offering shortly after Samsung. LG Art Lab, the company's new NFT trading platform, allows users to "buy, trade and enjoy high-quality digital artworks" from their TVs.

The program is currently only available to US customers who own an LG TV with webOS 5.0 or higher. Digital content published by LG for NFT can be bought and sold through the platform. The first of these releases is scheduled for September 22nd and will feature a pair of metallic NFTs by artist Barry X Ball.

As the proud owner of an LG TV capable of running the app, I jumped at the chance to try it out only to find that not much happened. There is currently no in-app content, no NFTs to watch or buy (unless you want to do the same thing I write about in this article and watch the next Barry X Ball NFT video again).

Once NFTs are available for purchase on the platform, according to LG, users can simply open the Wallypto app on their phone, scan the QR code displayed on the screen and make a purchase. Before you can do that, you need to buy USD coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar (and maintain that peg when other stablecoins fall).

To build its NFT platform, LG relied on Hedera, which bills itself as "the most widely adopted sustainable public ledger for a decentralized economy." The Hedera network uses a blockchain alternative called Hashgraph instead of the blockchain used by Ethereum and Solana, which is backed by many major NFT exchanges. Proponents of the Hedera network, of which LG is one of the main companies, claim that it is faster and more efficient than blockchain transactions.

The LG Art Lab app lets you see all the NFTs you've purchased, and the company promises it will continue to add artist NFTs "weekly". LG is apparently following the same strategy as Samsung with NFT in its TVs (sounds like a bit of extra money I don't want to put on my electricity bill).