Bitcoin mining company GoMining has officially launched its GoBTC Pay payment protocol, marking a significant milestone in the company's expansion into the bitcoin payments market. According to reports from Odaily Planet Daily and CoinDesk, the company unveiled the system alongside an open software development kit (SDK) and application programming interfaces (API). The platform enables retailers to build products and services that accept bitcoin for everyday purchases, with GoMining planning to recruit an initial 10 merchants as part of the rollout strategy. The newly released GoBTC Pay Gen1 SDK and API are designed to help merchants, wallet providers, and ecosystem partners add Bitcoin payments to their products and services without relying on fiat conversion or custodial intermediaries. The package includes merchant onboarding tools, payment management functions, online checkout integrations, developer documentation, an open API, and a web dashboard for transaction monitoring and settlement management.
The key differentiator of GoBTC Pay lies in its transaction structure, where the entire transaction is completed in bitcoin by default. As reported by GoMining, many competitors, including Square, allow customers to pay in bitcoin while delivering fiat currency to the retailer. GoMining retailers who want fiat will need to handle the conversion themselves. CEO Mark Zalan stated in a Telegram interview that the company's approach is designed to solve real problems with BTC payments, including high and variable fees, slow and unpredictable settlement, while preserving non-custody and onchain finality. The platform targets an average settlement finality of about 12 hours. This approach addresses a persistent friction point in cryptocurrency adoption: the desire of some merchants to hold Bitcoin directly rather than immediately converting to fiat currency, including businesses that view Bitcoin as a long-term asset or those seeking to minimize reliance on traditional banking systems. Unlike many crypto payment services that convert digital assets into fiat currency before settlement, GoMining processes payments directly on Bitcoin while allowing users to retain control of their assets throughout the transaction flow.
GoBTC Pay was built to enable bitcoin payments settled directly on the Bitcoin network, using GoMining's Stratum V2 mining protocol. According to Odaily Planet Daily and CoinDesk, the system has an average confirmation time of around 12 hours. The platform runs on GoMining's private 15 EH/s mempool infrastructure and uses Stratum V2 technology to prioritize transactions. Merchants will pay 0.2% in transaction fees, with the fee structure shared 50-50 between wallet providers and miners. This fee model represents a competitive advantage when compared to traditional credit card processing fees, which can range from 1.5% to 3.5% or more. The company cited industry data from Premier Payments, Forbes, and Visa litigation settlement documents indicating that merchants typically pay between 1.5% and 3.5% per transaction once interchange, assessment, and processor fees are combined. The low-fee structure leaves less room for intermediaries and requires GoMining to absorb fraud, volatility, and operational costs through its own infrastructure and block-production economics. The model is designed to reward infrastructure participants while encouraging payment adoption across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The launch positions GoMining to compete directly with Block (formerly Square), the fintech company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, which has been rolling out its own bitcoin payments service over the past year. As reported by Odaily Planet Daily and CoinDesk, Block's system allows businesses to accept BTC using the Bitcoin layer-2 network Lightning, while Square's service converts the bitcoin amount into U.S. dollars by default, meaning the receiving merchant receives payment in BTC only if it chooses to. GoMining appears to be betting that more businesses will want to receive and retain bitcoin directly, targeting businesses that want to retain part of their revenue in Bitcoin rather than converting to fiat currency by default. The introduction of a BTC-native settlement option provides a genuine alternative for merchants who want to avoid the volatility of converting to fiat or who wish to build a Bitcoin treasury, potentially accelerating the integration of Bitcoin into everyday commerce. According to GoMining's assessment, the payment network charging 0.2% could compete with crypto payment gateways that typically charge between 0.5% and 1%, while also challenging parts of the economics behind traditional card-processing networks.
Founded in 2021, GoMining operates a Bitcoin mining platform that allows users to earn BTC through NFT-linked hashrate rather than purchasing mining hardware. The company manages mining operations across multiple global data centers and is backed by Bitscale Capital, operates on Bitmain infrastructure, and uses BitGo for institutional custody. Its advisory board includes Tal Cohen, who previously served as CEO of Kraken US and held leadership roles at McKinsey and Google, who joined the board in June 2025. According to GoMining's earlier explanation, Bitcoin miners are well positioned to operate payment protocols directly on the Bitcoin mainnet because they already earn block rewards and can generate additional revenue from transaction processing and related services. This infrastructure model allows miners to become payment infrastructure providers while leveraging their existing block-production economics to compete effectively in the payments market.
