At Consensus Miami 2026, Gomining, one of the world’s top-10 Bitcoin miners with five million users, unveiled GoBTC, an open payment protocol that delivers instant authorization and onchain Bitcoin settlement within 12 hours at a flat 0.2% merchant fee.
What GoBTC Does
At checkout, GoBTC gives merchants real-time authorization, while onchain settlement on the Bitcoin base layer finalizes within 12 hours—bypassing sidechains, payment channels, or custodians. The protocol is non-custodial and free for users. The 0.2% fee is split evenly between wallet providers and Bitcoin miners. For context, traditional card processors charge 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction, making GoBTC significantly cheaper.
GoBTC is open infrastructure: any wallet provider can integrate it. Gomining is dedicating a specific mining pool to confirm GoBTC transactions, providing dedicated block space without competing with standard Bitcoin traffic. The company targets full 12-hour onchain settlement across the system by the end of 2026.
Why Now?
Bitcoin’s whitepaper, published 17 years ago, described the network as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” Yet adoption remains limited: in the U.S., only about 2,300 businesses accept Bitcoin directly, despite 22% of American adults owning it. The Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s primary payment layer introduced in 2018, took seven years to reach $1 billion in monthly volume. While Lightning processed $1.17 billion in November 2025 and over 12 million monthly transactions as of 2026, routing complexity and limited merchant adoption have kept widespread use at bay.
GoBTC takes a different architectural approach: it settles directly onchain using Bitcoin’s block confirmation mechanism, with Gomining’s mining infrastructure absorbing settlement latency. Whether the model scales beyond early integrations depends on wallet provider uptake and merchant response to the authorization-before-settlement timing.
For Gomining, this launch marks an expansion from its mining-as-a-service roots into the payments infrastructure layer—a bet that the company best positioned to confirm Bitcoin transactions is also the one best placed to settle them.