Pros
ConsGoBTC Pay Overview
| What is it? | Native $BTC payment protocol for wallet and merchant integration |
|---|---|
| Built by | GoMining |
| Payment model | Instant $BTC checkout, later Bitcoin L1 batch settlement |
| User fee | $0 direct network fee |
| Merchant fee | 0.2%– 0.1% goes to the wallet, 0.1% to miners |
| Custody model | 2-of-3 multisig |
What Is GoBTC Pay?
GoBTC Pay is a Bitcoin payments protocol from GoMining, designed to make $BTC usable for everyday purchases.
It's designed to be integrated into any Bitcoin wallet and point of sale system – not just be its own app.
Think paying at a cafe, shop, online checkout, or point-of-sale terminal.
The problem’s obvious if you’ve ever tried to use Bitcoin as money. It’s great as a long-term asset, but it’s still crazy awkward to pay with for small things.
It takes a full 10 minutes for a $BTC transaction to settle – and that’s if your transaction even gets into the next block. Not to mention fees if the network gets busy!
Neither buyers nor merchants really want to deal with all that.
So GoBTC Pay tries to fix that, by separating the payment experience from the final Bitcoin settlement.
At checkout, the user signs a Bitcoin payment authorization. Once that happens, GoMining tells the merchant the payment is approved, and neither of them have to wait for Bitcoin confirmation at that moment.
The actual Bitcoin settlement happens later in the background.
Obviously, GoBTC Pay can’t make Bitcoin blocks instant – but it makes Bitcoin payments feel instant at the checkout.
To keep things efficient but secure, the system uses a 2-of-3 multisig wallet. That means three parties are involved:
- The user
- GoMining
- An external recovery custodian.
Two of those three keys are needed to move the $BTC.
GoMining can’t spend the user’s BTC by itself while the funds are still sitting in the multisig wallet.
When a user moves BTC into the multisig wallet, they’re not signing anything over to GoMining. It’s just a transfer into the payment wallet.
From there, the user still signs each individual transaction that gets debited from that wallet.
In a nutshell, GoBTC Pay turns Bitcoin payments into a bank card-like experience, while still using real Bitcoin underneath.
GoBTC Pay Key Features
- Protocol with Wallet SDK: GoBTC Pay isn't just an app – it's a protocol that's designed so any Bitcoin-capable wallets can integrate it easily.
- Instant payment approval: There’s no waiting around at checkout – the merchant gets an “Approved” response after the user signs the transaction. The Bitcoin network confirmation comes later.
- Free for purchasers: Users don’t pay a direct Bitcoin network fee when making instant payments. GoMining covers settlement fees and recovers costs through merchant fees.
- Low merchant fee: Merchants pay a 0.2% fee, according to GoBTC Pay. That’s much lower than typical card processing fees, which typically range from 1.5% to as high as 3.5%. This fee is split 50/50 by miners and the wallet.
- Real Bitcoin settlement: GoBTC Pay settles the transactions using native $BTC. It doesn’t rely on wrapped $BTC or a separate sidechain asset.
- Multisig wallet: The 2-of-3 multisig wallet has a key each for the user, GoMining, and a recovery custodian. Two are needed to move funds, so GoMining can’t move the user’s $BTC alone.
- Signed, batched Bitcoin settlement: GoMining batches pending payments, uses fee boosting to help get the batch approved, and can send batches to its own miners to help get those payments confirmed cheaper and more smoothly.
GoBTC Pay Fees (and Rewards)
GoBTC Pay’s fee model is super simple for the main two parties involved – users pay no direct Bitcoin fee, and Merchants pay just 0.2%.
That’s a hell of a lot cheaper than typical bank card processing fees, which often cost around 1.5% to 3.5% in the US.
On a $100 sale, a merchant using GoBTC Pay would pay just $0.20, instead of up to $3.50 in card fees – a massive saving.
Just like card payments, the merchant gets an instant approval at checkout, but the actual Bitcoin settlement happens later.
In the background, miners get half of that 0.2% fee, while the wallet provider gets the other 0.1% – a great incentive for wallets to integrate the protocol.
| Amount | What it means | |
|---|---|---|
| User fee | $0 | No direct Bitcoin network fee |
| Merchant fee | 0.2% | Paid by merchants |
| Miner share | 0.1% | Comes from merchant fee |
| Wallet share | 0.1% | Comes from merchant fee |
| Settlement support | GoMining private mining pool | Supports lower-cost Bitcoin L1 settlement |
| Settlement target | ~12 hours by end of 2026 | GoMining’s target for on-chain settlement |
And GoBTC Pay isn’t just charging a low fee and hoping Bitcoin settlement stays cheap.
It supports much cheaper L1 settlement because it settles through its own private mining pool, backed by 15 EH/s of mining power.
That’s about 1.5% of the entire Bitcoin network’s mining power – and roughly equivalent to 75,000 high-end Bitcoin miners working at the same time.
Our Expert Review of GoBTC Pay
First things first: GoBTC Pay is a protocol, not just an app.
That means the bigger story isn’t the demo wallet itself – it’s the payment system GoMining is building underneath it, which could be integrated into Bitcoin wallets, merchant checkouts, POS systems, and ecommerce plugins.
In this first-hand GoBTC Pay review, I set up the demo GoBTC Pay app for iOS (Android available too), to understand what the user experience could look like in practice.
But the app should be treated as a sample front-end – not the full product.
The real value of GoBTC Pay is the protocol layer:
Instant payment approval, multisig custody, batched Bitcoin settlement, low merchant fees, and SDK-based wallet + merchant integration.
What The Demo App Shows
For this review, I tested the GoBTC Pay demo app to get a feel for how the protocol could work inside a wallet.
But the app itself is just one possible front-end – the bigger story is the GoBTC Pay protocol underneath it.
Setting up the GoBTC Pay app looked just like setting up a normal Bitcoin wallet:
- Download the app on your phone (already available both on iOS and Android)
- Back up your seed phrase
- Set up a PIN and biometric access like Face ID (optional).
If everything goes according to plan for GoBTC Pay, you won't even have to set up a new wallet – it will just become an extra feature in your existing Bitcoin wallet app.
You'll have two Bitcoin addresses
The GoBTC Pay app spits things up into two addresses/wallets:
- A regular Bitcoin wallet balance
- A separate BTC Pay balance
Why are they separate?
The regular Bitcoin wallet is fully non-custodial, so that you have 100% control over those funds – think of it like your savings account.
On the other hand, the BTC Pay wallet is a multi-sig account designed for spending. This is the wallet with GoBTC Pay’s instant payment system built into it.
GoMining can’t move funds from the BTC Pay wallet by itself. A transaction still needs approval from you or the recovery custodian. But it’s also not 100% under your control in the same way as the regular Bitcoin wallet.
This one’s more like your everyday spending account – only fund it with the amount you’re comfortable using for near-term payments.
Funding the BTC Pay Balance
Since this was a demo wallet experience, I’d treat this more as feedback on one possible front-end flow – not the GoBTC Pay protocol itself.
The GoBTC demo app experience was simple, super clean, and easy to use overall.
The only part I’d make clearer is the difference between the regular $BTC wallet and the BTC Pay wallet.
I wanted to try BTC Pay right away, but I accidentally funded the regular $BTC wallet first.
That meant I had to wait for the Bitcoin transaction to confirm, then send the funds again to the actual BTC Pay multisig address – that cost me two transaction fees on the Bitcoin blockchain too, oops.
The other small issue is that there wasn’t a quick “Move to BTC Pay” option.
I still had to manually copy and paste the BTC Pay address into the recipient field, which adds a little friction and creates room for mistakes.
A better flow would be:
- Tap BTC Pay balance.
- Tap “Fund from $BTC wallet.”
- Enter the amount.
- Confirm transfer.
That would make the experience much smoother overall.
Paying with GoBTC Pay
Once your BTC Pay address is funded, it’s super easy to start making those instant (and free!) $BTC payments that we’ve all been waiting for.
- Select the BTC Pay tab in the app
- Tap the purple “Pay” button
- Scan the merchant’s QR code using your phone’s camera (looks like it works only on GoBTC QR codes, which is good for security)
- Confirm the payment
From there, the merchant gets instant payment approval through GoBTC’s system.
No waiting around for a normal Bitcoin transaction to confirm, and the actual Bitcoin settlement will happen later in the background.
What if I’m a merchant?
For merchants, GoBTC Pay is doing its best to feel like you’re adding an everyday payment processor – rather than setting up a manual Bitcoin wallet and dealing with every transaction yourself.
To achieve that, their roadmap includes a bunch of very useful practical stuff:
- POS terminal
- Merchant dashboard
- Developer SDK
- Shopify plugin
- WooCommerce plugin
The idea is that merchants can add GoBTC Pay to their checkout options, accept $BTC payments, and track it all from a dashboard – without needing to babysit Bitcoin confirmations.
Lower fees, less admin
If you had to sum up the benefits of using GoBTC Pay as a merchant, it would be nice and simple:
Lower fees and less Bitcoin admin.
As I covered in the fees section, GoBTC Pay charges merchants only 0.2%, instead of typical bank card rates of 1.5% to 3.5%.
And merchants don’t have to make customers wait for their transactions to confirm – GoMining handles the approval, batch settlement, and payout in the background.
That streamlines everything for customers so that they can get in and out, fast.
Forget the annoying parts like confirmations, network fees, mempool delays, and tracking individual Bitcoin transactions.
The one thing worth noting, though, is that as a merchant, you’re relying on GoMining to settle and pay out properly and on time.
Fiat payout option
This is perhaps the most important part for merchants that don’t want to take $BTC all the time:
You might not have to ever touch $BTC yourself, if you don’t want it.
GoMining says its merchant solution will include a fiat off-ramp.
So a business could accept $BTC at checkout, and still cash out (without an exchange) to fiat for those non-BTC expenses like rent, payroll, suppliers, or taxes.
The exact payout currencies, timing, fees, and country support will just depend on GoMining’s merchant setup once it’s up and running.
A colleague of mine mentioned it would be cool if they added an earn feature to the merchant back end, which I thought was super clever.
Who wouldn’t want to earn yield on the $BTC they’ve been stacking while it sits there?
Customer Service
GoBTC Pay's support starts with a short FAQ section covering basic topics like fees, transaction speed, Lightning Network comparisons, and GoMining itself.
The main way to reach GoBTC Pay's customer support is through the “Contact Us” form on the GoBTC Pay website.
The platform was still yet to launch at the time this was written, so I wasn't able to check the response time just yet.
There’s also a white paper available, but that’s more technical reading than practical customer support.
Who’s GoBTC Pay For?
- Wallets that want $BTC payment features: Bitcoin wallets can integrate GoBTC Pay through the SDK instead of building a full payment system themselves.
- Bitcoin holders who want to spend $BTC: GoBTC Pay is great for people who want to use Bitcoin for real purchases, not just hold it.
- People who don’t want Lightning setup: GoBTC Pay might suit users who want fast $BTC payments without the technical side of managing channels, liquidity, or routing.
- Merchants that want lower $BTC payment fees: The 0.2% merchant fee is the clearest business reason to care, especially for merchants with $BTC-paying customers.
- Merchants that want simpler $BTC payments: GoBTC Pay makes Bitcoin acceptance feel more like adding a normal payment processor. Merchants can also receive fiat through GoMining’s off-ramp.
Who’s It Not For?
- People who want full self-custody: GoBTC Pay isn’t for users who want to control every Bitcoin payment themselves. GoMining is still part of the process.
- Users who need instant Bitcoin settlement: GoBTC Pay approves payments instantly, but the Bitcoin transaction settles later. If you need it confirmed right away, use a normal Bitcoin transaction.
- Merchants who want full control: Merchants still get BTC to their own wallet, but GoMining handles the approval and settlement process behind the scenes.
GoBTC Pay Alternatives
GoBTC Pay is a kind of middle ground between normal Bitcoin payments, Lightning, custodial crypto payment processors, and sidechain systems.
Its most typical comparisons are Lightning and custodial crypto payment processors.
GoBTC Pay vs. Lightning Network
The Lightning Network is the Bitcoin payments solution most people have heard of.
GoBTC Pay is trying to solve a similar problem, but in a different way.
Lightning uses payment channels, which means most activity happens inside the channel. Only the opening and closing state of the channel gets put on the actual Bitcoin blockchain.
GoBTC Pay puts every transaction onchain, so that a proper record of everything is kept.
Lightning can also get quite technical if you’re using it yourself, so you’ll need to think about channels, liquidity, and routing.
GoBTC Pay scraps most of that complexity for everyone involved, by handling it for you in the background.
| GoBTC Pay | Lightning Network | |
|---|---|---|
| User complexity | Simple checkout, no channels | Requires channels/routing |
| Custody model | 2-of-3 multisig | Self-custodial or custodial |
| Bitcoin-native design | Native $BTC, L1 settlement | Native $BTC in channels |
| Fees | $0 user fee; 0.2% merchant fee, split by miners and wallet | Usually low, but varies |
| Settlement model | Instant approval, settles all transactions on L1 later via GoMining private mining pool | Instant channel update, L1 settlement of closed channel state only |
GoBTC Pay vs. Custodial Crypto Payment Processors
Custodial payment processors are simple because the company holds the funds and just updates balances inside its own system.
GoBTC Pay is aiming for a similar easy checkout experience, but with a different trade-off. Users don’t have to hand over full control of their unspent $BTC just to make a fast payment.
| GoBTC Pay | Custodial Processor | |
|---|---|---|
| User complexity | Simple checkout, no channels | Usually very simple |
| Custody model | 2-of-3 multisig | Provider controls funds |
| Bitcoin-native design | Native $BTC, L1 settlement | Often internal balance/IOU |
| Fees | $0 user fee; 0.2% merchant fee, split by miners and wallet | Varies by provider |
| Settlement model | Instant approval, settles all transactions on L1 later via GoMining private mining pool | Instant internal approval, later payout |
GoBTC Pay vs. Regular Bank Card Payments
Bank card payments are already fast, familiar, and easy for everyday purchases.
GoBTC Pay is trying to give Bitcoin a similar checkout experience, with instant approval and final settlement later in the background.
Cards win on acceptance, chargeback protection, and familiarity, but GoBTC’s edge is wayyy lower merchant fees and letting $BTC holders spend their coins easily.
| GoBTC Pay | Regular bank card payments | |
|---|---|---|
| User complexity | Simple checkout, no channels | Very simple |
| Custody model | 2-of-3 multisig | Bank/card issuer controlled |
| Bitcoin-native design | Native $BTC, L1 settlement | Fiat currency |
| Fees | $0 user fee; 0.2% merchant fee, split by miners and wallet | Typically 1.5% to 3.5% for merchants |
| Settlement model | Instant approval, settles all transactions on L1 later via GoMining private mining pool | Instant approval, later card network/bank settlement |
Is GoBTC Pay Safe to Use?
GoBTC Pay has some solid safety features built in.
Funds sit in multisig, GoMining can’t spend them alone, and payments still need user approval.
It’s not risk-free, but it’s designed to be safer than a basic custodial payment app where the company fully controls the funds.
And although it’s a new payments solution – it’s not exactly a new company. That means we have a solid track record to judge GoMining from, without blindly trusting their GoBTC product.
GoBTC founding and company history
GoBTC Pay is part of GoMining, the Bitcoin mining company behind the GoMining app and digital miner ecosystem.
GoMining was founded by a group of international investors and launched its digital mining model in 2021. The company is now led by CEO Mark Zalan, who is also the main executive voice behind GoBTC Pay.
GoBTC Pay launched publicly in May 2026 as the payments side of GoMining’s wider Bitcoin ecosystem.
GoMining headquarters and regulation
GoMining is set up across a few places, including the British Virgin Islands, Latvia, and Czechia.
Its BVI companies are registered in Road Town, Tortola, while its European entities are tied to Riga and Prague.
It also lists a Czech company as a virtual asset service provider, and a related BVI entity is on the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission register as a regulated Approved Manager.
GoMining can’t spend user $BTC alone
The key thing to know is that GoMining can’t move a user’s $BTC by itself.
User funds sit in a 2-of-3 multisig wallet, with keys split between the user, GoMining, and a recovery custodian. Two keys are needed to move the $BTC.
The user still signs every individual transaction debited from that wallet, so only approved payments can go through.
Where users and merchants still need trust
GoBTC Pay reduces the amount of trust needed, but it doesn’t remove trust completely.
For users, the recovery custodian is the backup path if GoMining is unavailable. That’s useful, but it still depends on the custodian doing its job properly.
They haven’t explicitly published who they’ve picked yet, but GoMining typically uses Fireblocks for their regular wallet custody services.
For merchants, the main trust point is payout. They can get instant payment approval, but they still rely on GoMining to reconcile payments and send the final payout.
Final Thoughts on GoBTC Pay
GoBTC Pay is a serious attempt to make Bitcoin easier to use for everyday payments.
Its strongest features are instant checkout approval, native Bitcoin settlement, 2-of-3 multisig custody, no direct user fees, and low merchant fees.
It’s also got a more thoughtful safety setup than a basic custodial payment app.
Just keep in mind that instant approval doesn’t mean instant Bitcoin settlement.
Users still rely on GoMining for things to go right in the background, merchants rely on GoMining for payout, and the recovery custodian adds another party you have to be able to trust.
Overall, GoBTC Pay is worth watching because it’s not just another Bitcoin wallet app.
It’s a payment protocol that could let existing wallets add instant-feeling $BTC checkout, while still settling through Bitcoin L1 in the background.
The demo app is useful because it shows what GoBTC Pay could feel like inside a wallet. But the real opportunity is the protocol itself, especially if wallets, POS systems, and ecommerce platforms integrate it directly.
If wallet integrations happen, most users may experience GoBTC Pay through wallets they already use.
GoBTC Frequently Asked Questions
For users, yes. GoBTC advertises zero direct transaction fees. Merchants pay a 0.2% fee.
No. Lightning uses payment channels and only broadcasts the opening and closing channel states on-chain.
GoBTC uses signed payment approvals and broadcasts each and every transaction for Bitcoin L1 settlement.
No. Checkout approval is instant, but final Bitcoin settlement happens later.
User funds sit in a 2-of-3 multisig wallet, with keys split between the user, GoMining, and a recovery custodian. GoMining can’t move the $BTC alone.
Not yet by default. The plan is for Bitcoin wallets to connect through GoBTC’s wallet integration SDK and a partnership with GoMining.
GoBTC can keep fees low because it settles through GoMining’s own mining setup – complete with 15 EH/s and a private mining pool.
It has a goal of around 12-hour on-chain settlement per transaction by the end of 2026.
GoBTC Pay is best thought of as a payment protocol, not just an app.
The demo app shows how it can work, but the bigger idea is that other Bitcoin wallets can plug into GoBTC Pay and offer the same payment experience in their own apps.
That’s the plan. GoBTC Pay is built so Bitcoin-capable wallets can integrate it through the SDK, meaning users may eventually access it through wallets they already use.
