GoMining is launching GoBTC, a Bitcoin-native payments protocol it will unveil at the Consensus conference. The company pitches GoBTC as a low-cost alternative to Visa and Mastercard, enabled by its control of a meaningful share of Bitcoin hash rate.
GoBTC promises instant authorization at checkout and settlement directly on the Bitcoin mainnet within a few hours, using on-chain confirmations instead of card-network clearing and batch settlement. Merchants would pay a 0.2% processing fee — far below the typical 1.5%–3.5% merchants pay for card acceptance once interchange, assessment, and processor markups are included.
The firm frames miner-run rails as uniquely suited to operate payment protocols built on the mainnet because miners already earn block rewards and can monetize block space and transaction servicing. Forbes reports GoMining describes GoBTC as “a protocol only GoMining can run,” suggesting the design may rely on proprietary coordination with the company’s blocks or a preferred set of mining pools to guarantee settlement and fee characteristics.
A 0.2% headline rate compresses the traditional fee stack, leaving less room for intermediaries but shifting risk onto GoMining’s infrastructure and block-production economics. The company would need to absorb fraud, volatility, and operational costs within that smaller margin.
If deployed at scale, GoBTC could pressure existing crypto payment gateways (which often charge ~0.5%–1%) and traditional card processors dependent on multi-percent fee stacks. Industry sources and analyses note that card fees remain a major pain point for merchants and that any reliable on-chain alternative at a fraction of current costs “poses a credible threat to the status quo.” Ongoing regulatory and merchant pressure on card fees — underscored by recent multibillion-dollar settlements involving Visa and Mastercard — provides additional context for experiments routing payments over Bitcoin instead of legacy rails.