TechFlow News, May 5: According to a Forbes report, Bitcoin mining company GoMining plans to launch GoBTC—a Bitcoin-native payment protocol built on its own block production—at the Consensus conference. The protocol enables instant user authorization and settlement on the Bitcoin mainnet within hours, charging merchants a fee of just 0.2%, an order of magnitude lower than Visa and Mastercard’s 1.5%–3.5% fees.
GoMining claims to rank among the world’s top ten Bitcoin mining companies by hash rate. In an episode of the On The Margin podcast, CEO Mark Zalan stated, “We’ve created a way to achieve instant Bitcoin payments natively on Layer 1—without wrapped assets or Layer 2 solutions,” distinguishing GoBTC from mainstream L2 solutions like the Lightning Network.
The core mechanism of GoBTC relies on GoMining’s substantial hash rate. Zalan explained that the company operates its own mining pool, producing 2–4 blocks per day. Payments authorized via GoBTC’s multisig wallet are processed off-chain in batches and then included in blocks mined directly by GoMining. Because the company sets its own transaction fees on blocks it mines, it can reduce end-user fees to zero: “Since we’re the miners packaging those blocks, we can set any fee we want—and retain those fees ourselves.”
The 0.2% merchant fee will be split evenly between the wallet provider and the miner who packages the block. Zalan gave the example that if Trust Wallet serves as the payment wallet, Trust Wallet receives 50%, and the miner who packages the block receives the other 50%. This creates a third revenue stream for miners—beyond block rewards and spot BTC price appreciation. Following the April 2024 Bitcoin halving, the block reward dropped to 3.125 BTC, while the hash price—the revenue per unit of hash rate—has remained near historic lows for most of the past year.
Zalan added, “Moving Bitcoin beyond a mere ‘hold-and-hope’ store of value—and enabling it to function actively as a medium of exchange in the real economy—will drive the next phase of growth.”
