Bitcoin payment protocol for merchantswalletsmerchants

GoBTC is a Bitcoin payment protocol that lets people spend BTC at the point of sale - instantly, on Bitcoin's base layer, with no fee for the user. When a customer pays at a GoBTC merchant, the transaction is broadcast to GoMining's dedicated mining pool, which prioritises it for inclusion in the next block. There are no payment channels to manage, no fiat conversion at checkout, and no wrapped tokens - just Bitcoin, settled on Bitcoin.

Most Bitcoin payment companies depend on third-party mining pools to get their transactions confirmed, which means they have no control over confirmation times and pay full network fees on every transaction. GoMining mines the blocks itself. As one of the top-10 Bitcoin miners by hashrate globally, with a dedicated mining pool built specifically for GoBTC, we can prioritise GoBTC transactions and recapture the network fee through our own pool participation - a closed-loop economic model that no payments-only company can replicate without owning mining infrastructure at scale. We also already serve 5 million users and run data centres across three continents, giving us the operational footprint to launch a payment network at meaningful scale from day one rather than building a user base from zero.

The Lightning team did important pioneering work. They were the first to seriously tackle the problem of making Bitcoin usable for everyday payments, and the engineering thinking behind payment channels has shaped how the entire industry approaches Bitcoin scaling. We have a lot of respect for what they built. GoBTC takes that mission a step further by leveraging something Lightning was never designed around: our own private mining pool. Because GoMining mines the blocks itself, we can prioritize GoBTC transactions for confirmation directly on Bitcoin's base layer - no payment channels to open, no inbound liquidity to manage, no off-chain state for merchants or wallets to maintain. The result is a simpler integration for merchants and wallets, and payments that settle natively on Bitcoin rather than alongside it. Lightning and GoBTC can comfortably coexist; we just think the mining-pool approach is a more practical path to mainstream Bitcoin payments at the point of sale.

You do. GoBTC wallets use a 2-of-3 multi-signature architecture: one key lives on your device's secure enclave, one is held by GoMining as co-signer, and one is held by an independent regulated custodian. Any two keys are needed to authorise a transaction, which means GoMining can never move your funds unilaterally, and no single party - including us - has unilateral control. If you lose your device, the regulated custodian provides a recovery path. If GoMining were ever unavailable, you and the custodian can still recover and move your Bitcoin. This is a stronger model than custodial wallets, where one company controls everything, and more resilient than pure self-custody, where losing a seed phrase means losing your funds permanently.

For users, GoBTC is free - no transaction fees, no spreads, no hidden costs. For merchants, the acquiring fee is 0.2%, substantially below the 1.5-3.5% charged by card networks and well below the 1% charged by BitPay. On a $100 sale, the merchant keeps $99.80. On third-party transactions, GoMining keeps none of the fee: half goes to the miners in the GoBTC pool who confirm the transaction, and half goes to the wallet provider that initiated the payment. This revenue-share is how we incentivise wallets to integrate and grow the network, rather than locking participants into a closed system.

At the point of sale, GoBTC payments confirm instantly - the customer taps, the merchant sees the transaction, and the sale completes with the same speed as a card payment. On-chain settlement then follows on average every 12 hours through GoMining's dedicated pool. That is materially faster than the card networks: Visa and Mastercard merchant settlement typically takes one to three business days (T+1 to T+3), with funding sometimes pushed further out by weekends, holidays, or batch cut-off times. Just as importantly, GoBTC transactions are final. Once settled on-chain, they cannot be reversed. There are no chargebacks, no dispute windows, and no rolling reserves - a meaningful contrast with the card networks, where merchants face chargeback risk for weeks or months after a sale (American Express, for example, gives customers up to 120 days to file a chargeback). For merchants, this means cleaner cash flow, no fraud-related clawbacks, and certainty that revenue received is revenue kept.

GoBTC is built as open infrastructure. Any wallet provider - hardware (Ledger, Trezor), software (Trust Wallet, MetaMask), or custodial (banks, exchanges, fintech apps) - can integrate the GoBTC SDK and offer instant Bitcoin payments to their own customers. The protocol supports both custodial integrations, where the institution holds customer BTC, and non-custodial integrations, where the user holds their own keys. The connecting wallet earns 0.1% on every transaction it initiates, which compensates them for the integration work and creates an ongoing economic incentive to keep users on the network. GoMining operates the reference implementation and the settlement pool, but the network is designed to grow far beyond GoMining's own user base.