Episode Details

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/gomining-ceo-mark-zalan-on-gobtc-pay-02percent-merchant-fees-and-bitcoins-spending-problem.
GoMining CEO Mark Zalan on GoBTC Pay, 0.2% merchant fees, mining as payments infrastructure and why Bitcoin still loses the checkout to stablecoins.
Check more stories related to undefined at: https://hackernoon.com/c/undefined. You can also check exclusive content about #gomining, #mark-zalan, #gobtc, #bitcoin, #good-company, #defi, #blockchain, #cryptocurrency, and more.

This story was written by: @ishanpandey. Learn more about this writer by checking @ishanpandey's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

GoMining, a Bitcoin miner running roughly 15 EH/s and claiming more than five million users, has launched GoBTC Pay, a Layer 1 payment protocol that charges merchants 0.2% and splits that fee evenly between the wallet that brought the customer and the miners that confirm the transaction. The merchant pitch is genuine against cards, where the United States average credit card interchange rate sits at about 2.35%, and considerably weaker against Square, which auto enabled native Bitcoin acceptance for millions of United States sellers in March 2026 at zero processing fees through 2026. The product delivers instant authorization, not instant settlement. GoMining targets an average on chain settlement of about twelve hours using its own Stratum V2 mempool, which means GoMining, not the merchant, carries the exposure in between. CEO Mark Zalan argues that payments make mining more valuable because transaction activity becomes a larger share of miner economics. The current data points the other way. Transaction fees fell to 0.69% of Bitcoin miner revenue in August 2026, a ten year low, after bottoming at 0.52% in April. The arithmetic is unforgiving. Half of a 0.2% fee on a five dollar coffee pays miners half a cent, while replacing today's block subsidy at Bitcoin's throughput ceiling would require roughly sixty six dollars per transaction. The unmentioned constraint is tax. In the United States there is still no de minimis exemption for spending Bitcoin, and the emerging consensus in Congress would grant that relief to payment stablecoins while excluding Bitcoin. What to watch: the merchant count past the initial cohort of ten, whether any named wallet actually ships the protocol, and whether settlement holds at twelve hours once volume arrives. What is GoBTC Pay? GoBTC Pay is a Layer 1 Bitcoin payment protocol built by the mining company GoMining. It gives merchants instant authorization at checkout while the transaction settles on the Bitcoin base layer afterwards, using GoMining's own Stratum V2 mempool and mining pool to prioritise the transaction. Merchants pay 0.2% and customers pay nothing. How much does GoBTC Pay cost a merchant? 0.2% of the transaction. Half of that goes to the wallet or financial institution that brought the customer into the network and half goes to the miners in GoMining's pool that process