Delivering an innovative and superior customer experience at scale, responsibly

LG understands that delivering new and engaging user experiences is critical to the success of any consumer facing company, and is committed to the satisfaction of their customers. This commitment led LG to innovate around the idea of making digital artwork available as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to their users through their smart televisions, and looking to distributed ledger technology as a means of supporting this digitization.

But for LG, a company that serves millions of customers, every minute of every day around the world, delivering these types of experiences at scale requires innovative thinking that not only exceeds customer expectations, but must do so in a way that is completely frictionless and at a low cost to their end users.

Additionally, LG is also dedicated to being a leader in sustainability and environmental responsibility. Through their “Life’s good with it’s green” program, LG strives to limit their environmental impact at every stage of the delivery of their products, from development to manufacturing, through to retail outlets, and all the way to the end consumer - ensuring the highest level of efficiency and minimizing the resources used in their operations.

LG Art Lab: A State of the “Art” NFT marketplace for digital artwork, rooted in sustainability

LG’s pursuit of providing new, engaging experiences to their users led them to the launch of their own NFT platform called LG Art Lab on the Hedera network. LG Art Lab is a fully interactive digital marketplace that allows users of their smart televisions to not only buy, sell, and trade high quality digital artwork, but also to explore and discover work from artists that are embracing NFTs as a means of distributing their art.

LG chose the Hedera network for Art Lab thanks to a variety of factors. One of the most compelling was that Hedera offers one of the most proven NFT ecosystems available, offering a wide array of projects and marketplaces and supporting over 500 NFT communities. With so many projects and communities pushing the tokenization of assets forward, this ensures the highest levels of innovation around NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This level of participation also keeps the fee structures for creating, minting, or transferring an NFT to a minimum - especially when compared to other networks that offer fee structures that are exponentially higher.

Another driver for LG was that Hedera is uniquely capable of supporting the LG Art Lab marketplace thanks to the network’s ability to deliver fast, fair, and secure transactions - all in equal measure - better than other distributed ledger technologies. This was important to LG as they wanted to ensure that their users were able to interact with Art Lab without having to be exposed to any of the complexities or technical intricacies that are inherent in many other DLT networks, and which can limit the widespread success of what LG was trying to achieve, which as making their marketplace easily accessible and intuitive. The Hedera network is capable of processing over 10,000 transactions per second with transaction costs as low as $0.0001 USD. This ensures that when a user wants to purchase, sell, or trade any of the artwork on the Art Lab platform, the experience is smooth and almost instantaneous, and inexpensive.

Fairness is inherent in the network and by extension to Art Lab thanks to the transparent nature of Hedera’s consensus algorithm. This transparency is important as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are representations of unique assets, which means that there must be a mechanism in place that can certify the authenticity of these assets and provide a non-corruptible view of the movement of the digital artwork from artist to buyer and also between buyers. Again, in order to ensure that they are providing their customers with a new service that earns their trust, transparency is key. To that end, once purchased, an NFT can be traded on LG Art Lab marketplace, where users can easily view the transaction history of their art and have complete confidence in its authenticity.

For LG, the security aspect of the Hedera network was a leading driver. They needed to be sure that their customers could trust that the payment mechanism for purchasing any artwork through the Art Lab was safe and secure. Hedera’s use of bank grade cryptography on their network delivers on this trust and ensures that LG’s customers can be confident with their purchases in the marketplace. This has enabled LG to incorporate the use of their own mobile crypto wallet called Wallypto, that allows users to buy their digital assets by simply scanning a QR code displayed on on their smart TV to then connect their wallets and buy or sell their artwork quickly and with the highest levels of safety.

Finally, Hedera’s commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility are very much aligned with LG’s environmental, social, and corporate governance goals. ​​The Hedera network is unique in that it is a carbon-negative public network thanks to the efficiencies of its unique consensus model, which is a proof-of-stake consensus model, and the purchase of quarterly carbon offset credits by Hedera and its governing council. What this translates to for LG is that any NFTs which are minted and transferred on the Hedera network are done with the lowest carbon footprint of any public network.

The LG Art Lab marketplace has proven the ability for LG to continue creating innovative and engaging user experiences that maximize the capabilities of their superior consumer devices. Through their NFT platform, they are delivering an incredibly rich, interactive, and user-friendly digital art marketplace that is delighting their customers and staying true to LG’s position of leadership in sustainability.