At the Consensus Miami 2026 conference, Gomining—one of the world's top 10 Bitcoin miners with 5 million users—unveiled GoBTC, an open, non-custodial Bitcoin payment protocol that enables merchants to receive instant transaction authorization and achieve full on-chain settlement within 12 hours. The protocol charges merchants a flat fee of 0.2%, significantly lower than the 1.5%–3.5% typically charged by traditional card processors.
How GoBTC Works
GoBTC allows merchants to authorize payments in real time while settlement occurs directly on the Bitcoin base layer—not via sidechains, payment channels, or custodial intermediaries. The full settlement cycle completes within 12 hours. End users pay no fees; the 0.2% merchant fee is split evenly between wallet providers and Bitcoin miners.
Any wallet provider can integrate GoBTC as an open infrastructure. Gomining has dedicated a separate mining pool to confirm GoBTC transactions, ensuring the payments layer gets its own block space without competing with regular Bitcoin traffic. The company aims to roll out complete 12-hour on-chain settlement across the entire system by the end of 2026.
Why Now?
Seventeen years after the Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, only about 2,300 businesses in the U.S. directly accept Bitcoin, despite 22% of American adults holding the asset. The Lightning Network, launched in 2018 as Bitcoin's primary payments layer, took seven years to reach $1 billion in monthly volume. By November 2025, Lightning processed $1.17 billion, and by 2026, monthly transactions exceeded 12 million. However, routing complexity and limited merchant adoption have hindered widespread use.
GoBTC takes a different architectural approach: settlement occurs directly on-chain via Bitcoin’s block confirmation mechanism, with Gomining’s mining infrastructure absorbing settlement delays. Whether the model scales beyond initial integrations will depend on wallet provider adoption and how merchants respond to the pre‑settlement authorization window.
For Gomining, this launch marks a strategic expansion from its mining‑as‑a‑service roots into payment infrastructure. The company bets that the entity best positioned to confirm Bitcoin transactions is also the one best positioned to settle them.