Babylon Labs and GoMining have announced a strategic integration designed to let Bitcoin holders earn mining rewards without surrendering custody of their assets, deploying up to 1,000 BTC (roughly $75 million). The partnership uses Babylon’s Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (TBV) to keep collateral on the Bitcoin mainnet under programmable conditions, eliminating reliance on bridges or wrapped BTC. Institutional players will be able to access a tokenized fund structure with independent third-party custody and valuation, while retail users can lock funds via TBV to obtain stablecoin loans channeled directly into GoMining’s industrial mining operations. All mining rewards settle natively in BTC, flowing automatically into participants’ accounts.
Mark Zalan, GoMining’s CEO, said the firm is evaluating adding trustless vaults to its retail product suite, aiming to extend self-custodial mining access to a broader audience. David Tse, co-founder of Babylon Labs, emphasized that the integration advances the goal of allowing native Bitcoin to participate in decentralized finance while preserving its fundamental properties. Babylon’s staking protocol has already activated over $10 billion in assets under self-control models.
Separately, GoMining revealed plans to launch GoBTC, a Bitcoin‑native payments protocol pitched as a direct competitor to Visa and Mastercard, at this year’s Consensus conference. Merchants using GoBTC would get instant authorization at checkout, with settlement finalized on the Bitcoin mainnet within hours. The protocol charges a 0.2% merchant fee — dramatically lower than the typical 1.5%–3.5% card processing cost. Forbes reported that GoBTC is marketed as “a Bitcoin‑native alternative to Visa and Mastercard,” leveraging GoMining’s own hash rate and block production economics to compress the fee stack. If adopted at scale, the 0.2% rate could pressure both existing crypto payment gateways (which often charge 0.5%–1%) and legacy card networks whose revenues depend on multi‑percent interchange and assessment fees.
