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GoMining has launched GoBTC Pay, a Bitcoin payment protocol built to deliver on what the 2008 whitepaper originally promised: true peer-to-peer electronic payments.
GoBTC Pay enables free and instant Bitcoin transactions on the core Bitcoin layer — making it genuinely practical to use Bitcoin at the point of sale for everyday purchases. Payments are completely free for end-users, while merchants pay a small acquiring fee that undercuts traditional card processing costs.
The protocol is built as open infrastructure. GoMining operates the reference implementation, but any wallet provider — from Ledger to Trust Wallet to MetaMask — can integrate GoBTC Pay to offer instant Bitcoin payments directly to their users.
Why This Matters
Bitcoin is the dominant cryptocurrency — with a market cap above $1.5 trillion, more than 150 public companies holding BTC on their balance sheets, and spot Bitcoin ETFs managing roughly $100 billion in assets across a dozen funds. The U.S. government alone holds approximately 328,000 BTC. And yet, Bitcoin still can’t reliably process a retail transaction.
 
The Lightning Network was introduced in 2018 to solve exactly that problem. Seven years later, it reached $1 billion in monthly volume — but its average transaction size of $223 tells the real story: it’s mostly exchange-to-exchange flows, not someone buying groceries.
The gap between ownership and usability is stark. Around 22% of U.S. adults own Bitcoin, yet only 2,300 U.S. businesses accept it directly — and that gap is widening, not closing.
GoBTC Pay is built to close it.
“The first line of the Bitcoin whitepaper describes a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin was designed to be money, not just an asset. That promise is still unfulfilled, and we intend to deliver on it,” said Mark Zalan, CEO of GoMining. “We already serve millions of users, and run data centers on three continents. All of this provides us a unique position to enable native Bitcoin payments with GoBTC Pay.”
Mining-Powered Confirmation
GoBTC Pay doesn’t rely on third-party infrastructure to confirm transactions — it uses GoMining’s own mining operation to do it.
The protocol runs on a 2-of-3 multi-signature architecture shared between the user, GoMining, and a regulated third-party custodian, enabling free and instant Bitcoin payments with a target of 12-hour on-chain settlement by end of 2026. GoMining has built a dedicated mining pool specifically for processing GoBTC Pay transactions — mining the blocks itself rather than depending on external pools.
That pool does double duty. It also serves GoMining’s “digital miners” — users who own tokenized hashrate through the GoMining app — routing a portion of GoBTC Pay transaction fees back to them as additional BTC yield. The result is a self-contained ecosystem: consumers pay with BTC, merchants earn BTC, miners earn a share of payment fees, and GoMining’s pool processes every transaction.
With 5 million users globally, GoMining brings both the infrastructure and the network to make this work at scale. And because GoBTC Pay is built as open infrastructure, any wallet provider — hardware, software, or custodial — can connect to the network and offer instant Bitcoin payments to their own users.
Bitcoin Payments for Merchants
For merchants, GoBTC Pay is a Bitcoin-native acquiring network that undercuts every major card processor on cost. Its 0.2% acquiring fee is a fraction of the 1.5% to 3.5% typical of traditional card processing in the U.S. On a $100 sale, the merchant keeps $99.80.
GoMining distributes the entire fee back into the ecosystem: half goes to the miners who confirm the transaction, and half goes to the wallet provider that initiated the payment. GoMining retains nothing on third-party transactions — a deliberate move to incentivize wallet integrations and accelerate adoption across the network.
Merchants can receive BTC directly to their own wallet, or opt into GoMining’s custodial merchant solution, which offers yield on BTC balances — including during the settlement window — alongside a fiat off-ramp for those who need it. In the coming months, GoBTC Pay will ship with a dedicated PoS terminal, a web merchant dashboard, a developer SDK, and plugins for Shopify and WooCommerce.
The launch coincides with GoMining’s major U.S. expansion. The company is building combined data centers for Bitcoin mining and AI workloads, targeting 1 GW of compute capacity in 2026.
GoBTC Pay made its public debut with a live demo at Consensus Miami 2026 (May 5–7, Miami Beach Convention Center).