LG has its finger on the pulse of the economy with a new NFT platform

South Korean tech giant LG has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) platform called LG Art Lab, on which users can buy, sell, and gawp at digital images deemed to be worth large sums of cash.

LG has unveiled an NFT platform called LG Art Lab, which is available in the US on LG TVs running webOS 5.0 or later. The platform enables users to buy and sell as well as display the digital images, in what the firms described as the ‘perfect medium for displaying one’s NFT collection’ – which with the cost of living crisis in full swing must be up there with space tourism and Faberge eggs in terms of consumer demand.

The platform includes the LG Art Lab Drops feature, which profiles artists and previews new works that will soon be available on the platform. There’s also a real-time ‘Live Drops’ countdown which ‘ensures users never miss an opportunity to acquire a ‘just dropped’ NFT.’ It’s all based on Hedera network, which is apparently an enterprise-grade public ledger for the decentralized economy, and incorporated onscreen QR codes for transactions via Wallypto – the company’s crypto-currency wallet for smartphones.

LG Art Lab will include the first NFTs from someone called Barry X Ball, who LG says is famous for reinterpreting classical and modernist sculptures using 3D scanning and printing technologies, as well as traditional techniques.

Of all fringe technology or things categorised under the Web3 umbrellas, NFTs are perhaps the most easy to dismiss and poke fun at, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a fad or won’t go on to be more popular as some sort of parallel art investment market in the future. However outside of niche tech communities, we are still at the stage where almost everyone would give you a blank look if you brought them up in conversation.

More to the point, in the last six months the residual impact of covid lockdowns, supply chain breakdowns, the war in Ukraine and subsequent skyrocketing energy costs all mean people are having to seriously look at expenditure which is impacting all sorts of sectors. Regardless of how well the new LG Art Lab turns out to be as a platform, it’s hard to imagine anything less tuned into the current mood than a new way to buy NFTs.

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