LG Electronics Inc. jumped on the crypto bandwagon today with a new nonfungible token platform for some of its smart TVs that allows viewers “buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork” during their viewing experience.

The marketplace, called LG Art Lab, is available only in the United States for LG TVs that run webOS 5.0 or later. Users can access it by downloading the app onto their TV’s home screen and get to buying art NFTs.

The company said it will deploy digital artwork via “art drops” monthly through the marketplace starting Sept. 22. The first would feature a set of metallic-looking NFTs from sculptor Barry X Ball.

Nonfungible tokens, also called NFTs, are a type of crypto asset built using blockchain technology that represents the unique ownership of digital assets such as artwork, music and even video game items. It’s possible to buy, sell and trade digital art and still maintain proof of ownership using NFTs. Thanks to their unique and tradable nature, they can hold real-world value.

LG partnered with Hedera Hashgraph LLC to launch the platform and marketplace. It’s a high-efficiency provider of a blockchain alternative called a “hashgraph,” which is not well-known for NFT use cases. Hedera says its hashgraph technology is highly secure and much more energy-efficient than blockchain technology and in many cases 100 times faster than the most popular NFT blockchains such as Ethereum. However, Ethereum is about to cut energy costs by over 99% with its Merge update later this month.

As of May 2020, LG joined as a member of Hedera’s governing council alongside numerous other large corporations and is part of approving the roadmap for updates to the blockchain’s codebase.

In order to use the platform, users will link up with Wallypto cryptocurrency wallets on their phones using a QR code from their smart TVs that was developed by Hedera. Users will first need to purchase USD Coin, a stablecoin cryptocurrency that maintains parity with the U.S. dollar, in order to buy NFTs from their TVs.

LG’s NFT platform follows Samsung’s own foray into NFT artwork by a few months after the electronics company also began integrating the technology into its own 2022 TV lineup in May with a partnership with Nifty Gateway.

Image: LG Electronics