GoMining’s GoBTC protocol promises instant authorization and on-chain Bitcoin settlement with a 0.2% trading fee, positioning miner-run bars as a low-cost competitor to Visa and Mastercard.
summary
- Bitcoin mining company GoMining plans to launch GoBTC, a Bitcoin-native payments protocol built on its own block production, at a consensus conference.
- GoBTC will offer instant authorization and settlement on the Bitcoin mainnet within a few hours, charging merchants a fee of 0.2% – well below the roughly 1.5%-3.5% average for Visa and Mastercard.
- The company is pitching the protocol as a direct challenge to existing card networks, using block space and mining rewards to compress traditional fee stacks.
according to ForbesGoMining will officially launch its GoBTC payment protocol at a consensus event this year, where it will market it as a “native bitcoin alternative to Visa and Mastercard” that the company can operate because it controls a significant share of the hash rate.
The protocol is designed so that merchants receive an “instant authorization” at checkout while settlement ends live on the Bitcoin mainnet within a few hours, leveraging the underlying blockchain confirmation process rather than scanning the card network and settling payments.
As for pricing, GoMining says GoBTC will charge merchants a 0.2% processing fee, which is lower than the 1.5% to 3.5% combined fees merchants typically pay to accept credit cards once exchange, valuation, and processor markup are included.
Industry data from sources like Premier Payments and Forbes show that standard card processing costs typically range between 1.5% and 3.5% per transaction, with recent litigation settlement documents from Visa citing average swipe fees in the same range — a difference that GoMining explicitly uses as its benchmark.
In comparison, GoBTC’s 0.2% key rate leaves much less room for brokers but also shifts risk to GoMining’s infrastructure and block production economics, as the company must cover fraud, volatility and operational costs from a much lower fee percentage.
An attempt backed by miners to turn Bitcoin into a means of payment
The idea of GoMining is that miners are in a unique position to run payment protocols that exist directly on the mainnet, because they already earn block rewards and can structure additional revenue around transaction fees and value-added services.
The Forbes article emphasizes that GoBTC is not just a wallet or gateway but “a protocol that only GoMining can run,” meaning that its design may rely on coordinating ownership with the company’s own blocks or a preferred set of mining pools to ensure certain settlement and fee characteristics.
If implemented at scale, the 0.2% on-chain payment protocol could put pressure on existing crypto payment gateways that charge fees ranging from 0.5% to 1% per transaction, as well as traditional card processors whose economics are based on multi-percentage fee pools.
Latest crypto news analysis It noted that card fees remain a major pain point for merchants, with average processing fees impacting weak retail margins, a backdrop that GoMining is clearly targeting with its sub-1% offering.
Other crypto news summary GoBTC has split its 1.5% to 3.5% fee range into exchange, valuation, and tokenization components, arguing that any on-chain alternative that can provide similar reliability at a fraction of that cost “poses a real threat to the status quo” — a challenge that GoBTC now clearly faces.
Separate crypto.news website surround He highlighted how the $30 billion swipe fee settlement from Visa and Mastercard highlighted regulatory and commercial pressures on card fees, adding more momentum to experiments like GoBTC that are trying to route payments through Bitcoin rather than legacy rails.
