Bitcoin mining company GoMining launches payment protocol GoBTC, with a 0.2% merchant fee rate challenging Visa and Mastercard

Deep Tide TechFlow News, May 5th, according to Forbes reports, Bitcoin mining company GoMining plans to release the native Bitcoin payment protocol GoBTC based on its own block production at the Consensus conference. The protocol offers users instant authorization and settlement on the Bitcoin mainnet within hours, charging merchants a 0.2% fee rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than Visa and Mastercard’s 1.5% to 3.5% fee rates.

GoMining claims to rank among the top ten Bitcoin mining companies worldwide based on hash power. Its CEO, Mark Zalan, stated on the On The Margin podcast, “We have created a way to achieve Bitcoin instant payments natively on the first-layer network without any wrapped assets or second-layer solutions,” distinguishing it from existing mainstream L2 solutions like the Lightning Network.

The core mechanism of GoBTC relies on GoMining’s hash power scale. Zalan said the company operates its own mining pool, producing 2 to 4 blocks daily. Payments authorized through the GoBTC multi-signature wallet are processed in batches off-chain and then packaged on-chain by GoMining’s own mined blocks. Since the company sets its own fee rates on its own blocks, it can reduce user-side fees to zero. “Because we are the miners packaging the block, we can set any fee rate as needed and recover the fees ourselves.”

The 0.2% fee for merchants will be split between the wallet provider and the miners who package the blocks. Zalan gave an example: if Trust Wallet is the payment wallet, Trust Wallet receives 50%, and the miner who packages the block gets the other 50%. This provides miners with a third source of income beyond block rewards and Bitcoin spot appreciation. After the Bitcoin block reward halved to 3.125 BTC in April 2024, the unit hash price has mostly hovered at historic lows over the past year.

Zalan stated, “Getting Bitcoin to move beyond mere store of value mentality and into actual circulation as a medium of exchange will drive the next phase of growth.”