LG and Metaplanet's dual strategy provides a clear observation sample: non-crypto native corporate giants are using blockchain to address two specific pain points: advertising attribution and asset yield.

Written by: ODIG Invest

To determine whether a technology truly takes off, one must look at who is paying for it and why they are paying.

LG and Metaplanet's dual strategy provides a clear observation sample: non-crypto native corporate giants are using blockchain to address two specific pain points: advertising attribution and asset yield.

When crypto is no longer noisy, what does its turning point look like? Pragmatic adoption may be worth betting on.

In the same week, two unrelated events occurred.

On June 11, Fortune disclosed that global consumer electronics giant LG Electronics is collaborating with Ethereum L2 Arbitrum to build a blockchain network for digital advertising; the next day, Japanese listed company Metaplanet announced the acquisition of licensed brokerage Siiibo Securities for approximately $13.1 million, intending to turn its 40,177 BTC into a revenue product for local investors.

One sells televisions, the other hoards BTC; one talks about advertising, the other talks about finance. The two have no business overlap.

They seem to have stirred no ripples in the Web3 native community. However, this "boredom" is precisely the signal itself.

When an event no longer needs the community to celebrate it, it often indicates that it has crossed over from the clamor of speculation to the doorstep of the industry.

Put together, they answer the same question: what does the turning point look like when blockchain transitions from a "speculative target" to "infrastructure" and "financial pipelines"?

Understand the Mechanism

LG is not "advertising on Arbitrum", but moving the ledger of the advertising industry onto the blockchain. This is based on the Arbitrum tech stack, constructing a shared inventory database for advertisers and publishers, and tracking real interactions between users and advertisements on-chain.

Why advertising?

The core contradiction of digital advertising is essentially a multi-party trust issue: advertisers, media, and intermediaries each insist on "whether this exposure actually occurred and who should be attributed". The longer the chain, the higher the cost of trust and the bigger the space for fraud. Blockchain here is not a gimmick, but a neutral, auditable layer of shared truth.

How big is this market?

According to Dentsu's data, global digital advertising spending is expected to reach about $679 billion by 2025, accounting for 68% of total advertising expenditure. LG's target is not wallet users, but an already existing massive budget. Clear boundaries need to be drawn, as commercial certainty still stands on the eve of transitioning from corporate PoC to commercialization.

Next, look at Metaplanet, which exchanged $13.1 million for Type I financial instrument business qualifications, an online securities platform, and a ready customer base. The delivery is expected to be completed by July 2026, and Siiibo will be renamed Metaplanet Securities.

The CEO described this as the first step of "Project Nova": transforming the BTC on their balance sheet (Japan's largest and the world's third-largest publicly listed holder) from passive reserves to active yield.

This seems to be the 2.0 version of BTC treasury companies: evolving from "asset holding companies" to "financial product platforms." However, the specific mechanisms for yield (bonds, preferred shares, structured notes, or collateral financing) have not been disclosed, and the products are yet to be validated. It is worth noting that the path has seen the fall of BlockFi and Celsius, where making volatile assets "stable returns" has always been high-risk territory.

Three Judgments

Both tracks are trillion-dollar battlefields.

The first is on-chain "advertising". The $679 billion market has long been eroded by advertising fraud at the scale of hundreds of billions.

But a deeper change lies on the L2 side: Arbitrum's significance is not just a cheaper Ethereum L2, but an execution environment capable of accommodating custom corporate needs; the narrative of L2 has shifted to "industry application chains".

Here, the advertising market is abstracted into a "multi-party shared ledger + automated matching + auditable reach", making L2's selling points evolve from "cheaper transactions" to "programmable business markets", with competitive dimensions shifting from gas, TPS, and airdrops to corporate BD, data privacy, compliance interfaces, and composable business processes.

The winner of this track may not be Web3 native projects, but traditional giants with traffic entry points. Distribution gateways are often scarcer than technology, and LG holds exposure across hundreds of millions of connected devices.

The second is BTC yield products.

Metaplanet marks the evolution of BTC treasury companies from 1.0 (only buying) to 2.0 (treasury as a financial institution). Once BTC becomes "raw material", it can be turned into bonds, preferred shares, yield certificates, or collateral.

But where the yield comes from determines how large the risks are: lending (counterparty risk), covered calls (upside limited), staking (BTC derivatives), RWA credit (underlying risks); the most dangerous products are often those that package high risks into "stable returns".

Why Japan?

Once regulation incorporates Web3 into the financial instrument system, licensed institutions can design standardized products. Metaplanet is seizing licenses, entry points, and compliance packaging capabilities, not the quantity of BTC. Japan may become the experimentation field for "compliant Web3 financial products" in Asia.

Looking at the two events together provides clearer insight:

Value capture is sinking from the "asset layer" to the "pipeline layer".

Over the past decade, the main characters in Web3 narratives have been assets (Tokens, NFTs, etc.), and corporate entry has often stayed at the front-end experience. LG and Metaplanet represent the second usage: treating the chain as a pipeline for settlement, proof, and compliance, with assets receding to the background or even becoming invisible.

End users will not know they are using a chain; they will simply feel clearer reconciliations and more purchasable products. This is the more valuable direction—not to make users participate in Web3 for the sake of Web3, but to enable enterprises to use chains to reduce coordination costs in their existing businesses.

Judgment Two: "Non-awareness" is the true hallmark of adoption.

When users no longer discuss "I am online", only then does the internet win. The Web3 industry has long interpreted "crossing over" as "more people buying Tokens", but true adoption happens when more people unknowingly use it.

Judgment Three: Pragmatic adoption is accelerating.

This is the most crucial commonality between the two events: they are driven by a specific business pain point. LG aims to address the opacity of advertising attribution, while Metaplanet seeks to monetize idle BTC assets.

As two non-Web3 native enterprises, they use blockchain because it indeed works better than existing solutions in these two scenarios. This should be amplified: traditional companies using blockchain to solve real pain points often have more sustainable deployment cases and are more likely to gain regulatory recognition.

First, it is rooted in already existing, continuously paid real budgets; second, its demand side consists of mature enterprises with revenue and compliance constraints, viewing the chain merely as a tool for cost reduction and efficiency improvement, which can be calmly assessed, replaced, or scaled; third, projects initiated by licensed or regulated entities allow regulators to understand and accept them more easily. When the buyers of blockchain shift from "speculators" to "company CFOs and procurement departments", the foundation of this industry becomes truly solid.

What is worth continuously tracking next are these cases of "traditional enterprises + real pain points + on-chain solutions," as they can better illustrate the real progress of adoption than any market fluctuation.

Trend Inference: Five Main Lines

The main battlefield is shifting from "on-chain user growth" to "industrial budgets".

LG targets advertising budgets, not wallet users.

In the future, valuable projects must answer: can they enter existing budget items of enterprises? Advertising, payments, clearing and settlement, supply chain finance, data rights confirmation, asset management—these existing expenditures are the true battlefields.

Infrastructure projects need "industry solution" capabilities.

Simply selling "high-performance chains" is no longer enough. Enterprises seek implementable systems: identity, permissions, privacy, auditing, SLA, settlement, and integration with existing CRM/ERP/advertising systems.

If L2, ZK, and modular chains cannot be packaged for industry, it will be difficult to transform from technical narratives into revenue.

BTC monetization has become a competitive focus for institutions.

Treasury companies are evolving from "asset holders" to "BTC financial product platforms". Traditional clients are not satisfied with "buy and hold"; they need answers to: can it earn interest? Can it be used as collateral? Can it be included in tax accounting? Can it be distributed in compliance?

"Pragmatic landing" will be more worthy of investment than "narrative strength."

Those truly crossing cycles will be projects rooted in real business pain points and driven by mature enterprises or licensed entities. They gain sustainable budgets by effectively reducing costs and improving efficiency for enterprises.

The value capture of Tokens still requires caution—this is cold water on all trends.

Just because LG uses Arbitrum does not automatically mean ARB will appreciate; Metaplanet's product launches do not automatically result in BTC rising. It is necessary to distinguish between "business adoption, protocol revenue, and value capture." Many projects may win adoption, but Tokens may not simultaneously capture cash flow.

Revelations

In June, we witnessed two facets of Web3 maturation: one embeds the chain into real business distribution, while the other embeds BTC into distributable financial products. Their common underlying theme is pragmatism, with non-Web3 native enterprises using blockchain to solve a specific business problem.

This collectively shows that the next phase of Web3 competitiveness comes from who can turn on-chain capabilities into products that enterprises are willing to pay for, that regulators allow to be sold, and that users can understand. We need to actively monitor the deployment cases of "traditional enterprises using chains to solve real pain points."

For entrepreneurs, avoid creating "on-chain versions of existing concepts"; instead, seek authentic multi-party collaboration pain points in traditional industries, prioritizing scenarios where the chain can genuinely reduce coordination costs. Failing to translate technical metrics into customer metrics will result in missing out on real budgets.

Focus on three things: identify genuine budget entry points, build compliance and distribution capabilities, and clarify how Tokens will capture value.

The most vital Web3 in the future may resemble more of an "industrial operating system" and "financial product factory". When headlines no longer belong to Web3, perhaps it truly enters its infrastructural era.