Gomining, one of the world's top 10 Bitcoin miners with 5 million users, has introduced GoBTC at Consensus Miami 2026 — an open-source payment software protocol that provides instant authorization and 12-hour on-chain settlement of Bitcoin transactions at a flat 0.2% merchant fee, significantly lower than the 1.5%–3.5% charged by traditional card processors.
What is GoBTC?
GoBTC gives merchants immediate authorization at the point of sale, meaning transactions are registered in real time. Settlement on the Bitcoin mainnet completes within 12 hours, using the base layer directly without routing through sidechains, payment channels, or intermediaries. The protocol is non-custodial and free for users; merchants pay a fixed 0.2% fee, which is split equally between wallet providers and Bitcoin miners.
GoBTC is an open infrastructure — any wallet provider can integrate the protocol. Gomining has dedicated a special mining pool to validate GoBTC transactions, giving the payments layer its own block space without competing with regular Bitcoin traffic. The company aims to achieve full 12-hour on-chain settlement across the system by the end of 2026.
Why Now?
Bitcoin's 2009 whitepaper described it as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” but 17 years later, only about 2,300 businesses in the U.S. directly accept Bitcoin, while 22% of American adults own it. The primary payment layer, the Lightning Network, launched in 2018 and took seven years to reach $1 billion in monthly volume ($1.17 billion in November 2025). Since 2026, it has processed over 12 million monthly transactions. Yet, routing complexity and limited merchant adoption have hindered widespread use.
GoBTC bets on a different architecture: direct on-chain settlement, with Gomining's mining infrastructure absorbing the settlement latency. Whether the model scales beyond early integrations depends on wallet provider adoption and how merchants respond to the “authorization-before-settlement” timeline.
For Gomining, the launch marks an expansion from mining services into the payments infrastructure layer. The company is betting that the entity best positioned to validate Bitcoin transactions is also best positioned to settle them.