GoMining challenges Jack Dorsey's Square with payments system designed around bitcoin

Bitcoin BTC$62,478.86 mining company GoMining said it is making it easier for companies to accept bitcoin BTC$62,478.86 payments, bringing it into competition with companies including Block's (XYZ) Square.

Where GoMining says it differs from incumbents is that the entire transaction is completed in bitcoin. Many competitors, including Square, allow customers to pay in bitcoin while delivering fiat currency to the retailer. GoMining retailers who want fiat will need to handle the conversion themselves.

"Our idea isn't to squeeze bitcoin into the old fiat experience and lose what makes it bitcoin along the way," CEO Mark Zalan said in an interview over Telegram. "It's to solve the real problems with BTC payments the high and variable fees, the slow and unpredictable settlement, while preserving non-custody and onchain finality."

GoMining's software development kit (SDK) and application programming interfaces (API) for its BTC payment protocol GoBTC Pay, unveiled Friday, enable retailers to access its GoBTC Pay system. The company plans to recruit an initial 10 merchants as part of the rollout, it said.

GoBTC Pay was built to enable bitcoin payments settled directly on the Bitcoin network, using GoMining's Stratum V2 mining protocol, with an average settlement time of around 12 hours. Merchants will pay 0.2% in transaction fees, shared 50-50 between wallet providers and miners.

Block, the fintech company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, has been rolling out a bitcoin payments service of its own over the past year. The system allows businesses to accept BTC using the Bitcoin layer-2 network Lightning. Square's service converts the bitcoin amount into U.S. dollars by default, meaning the receiving merchant receives payment in BTC only if it chooses to.

GoMining appears to be betting that more businesses will want to receive and retain bitcoin directly.