Gomining’s Solovev Urges Miners to Build Bitcoin Payment Rails

Kirill Solovev, founder of Gomining, argues that bitcoin mining infrastructure is undervalued and urges public miners to develop payment rails and retail payment infrastructure that use their existing capacity.

After the 2024 halving, many public miners moved large parts of their operations into high-performance computing and AI data centers. Companies signed tens of billions of dollars in GPU cloud-hosting agreements and repurposed secured power allocations, electrical grids and cooling systems instead of deploying ASICs for those workloads. Network computing power fell periodically after topping more than 1,100 exahashes per second, prompting consecutive downward difficulty adjustments. The protocol continued to target roughly 10-minute block times.

Solovev highlighted the valuation gap between tech and crypto firms and noted, “Bitcoin’s market capitalization today is smaller than the capitalization of Nvidia alone.” He framed that gap as a thesis for accumulation rather than a certainty and urged miners to treat their hardware and sites as the basis for payments services as block subsidies decline.

Gomining introduced GoBTC, a Layer-1 protocol intended to enable instant retail payments using bitcoin on-chain. The protocol applies a 0.2% merchant fee, provides instant approval at retail checkout and settles final transactions on-chain within 12 hours. The design uses a 2-of-3 multi-signature structure split among the user, Gomining and a regulated recovery custodian. Gomining may act on funds only after a transaction reaches the mempool. Any two of the three signature holders can authorize a transfer and users retain the ability to withdraw funds independently.

Gomining states the arrangement trades some aspects of single-key self-custody for faster, low-cost retail checks while preventing any single party from unilaterally moving a user’s funds. The company notes keeping transactions on-chain also separates the moment of payment from the moment of execution in the mempool, which it says can reduce deanonymization risks for larger balances.

Geopolitical shifts have changed mining geography. Following China’s 2021 mining ban, operations concentrated in the United States and the United Arab Emirates, increasing those regions’ share of physical infrastructure. With block subsidies expected to decline over time, on-chain fee revenue is likely to rise in importance, and corporations may build dedicated data centers to secure payment flows and computing capacity.

Solovev cautioned against firm forecasts, calling attention to historical surprises, and suggested technological change including AI could alter economic incentives. He presented the developments as scenarios the industry should prepare for rather than as predictions.