Arbitrum token jumps 5% on news LG Electronics is building a new blockchain

Arbitrum’s native ARB token is up over 5% on the day following news that LG Electronics has tapped the Ethereum scaling solution to launch a new blockchain. 

The network is designed to support advertising and media-related use cases, according to Fortune, which reported the story on Thursday, citing representatives from LG and Arbitrum. 

This would not be LG’s first foray into blockchains. The South Korean tech conglomerate has previously launched the enterprise-focused Monachain, through its IT services arm LG CNS, and a dedicated Wallypto crypto wallet. It has also explored AI agentic payments via deposit tokens, as part of the Bank of Korea’s Project Han River pilot.

Last year, LG shuttered its Art Lab NFT marketplace, which was first launched on Hedera before expanding to Ethereum.

According to Fortune, LG’s new Arbitrum-based network will serve as a platform for placing, buying, selling, and managing digital ads, with the hope that onchain transactions will make the sector more transparent and efficient. It will also keep a record of how customers have interacted with the advertisements, and provide a shared ad inventory database for advertisers and publishers.

The chain, which does not appear to have a name yet, was reportedly developed by LG’s dedicated blockchain research lab and piloted the project with an unnamed Japanese ad agency.

Several institutions and startups are also taking a swing at blockchains built to manage IP. Notably, Sony’s Soneium chain, built on rival Ethereum scaling solution Optimism, was designed for entertainment-related use cases, while blockchains like Story are built to store and manage intellectual property.

Arbitrum is a leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution developed by Offchain Labs that uses optimistic rollups to provide faster and cheaper transactions. The network generated some controversy following the KelpDAO hack, after the Arbitrum Security Council froze 10s of millions of dollars worth of ETH to return to victims.