In a recent conversation between Metaverse Post and Kirill Solovev, founder and chairman of GoMining, he worked through a question the industry keeps deferring: what is Bitcoin actually for. Not digital gold, not a speculative line on a chart, and not, in his view, only collateral sitting on someone else’s balance sheet. His answer is more specific than the usual maximalist line, and it doubles as an account of what GoMining has spent years building.
Why GoMining Founder Doesn’t Call Bitcoin “Digital Gold”
Solovev’s starting point is that Bitcoin’s finiteness is what separates believers from speculators, and that the separation is measurable: “If you separate holders, the believers, from speculators, the comparison turns out to be fairly transparent,” he said, pointing out that most hedge funds have failed to beat a simple buy-and-hold strategy over time. Institutional adoption through spot Bitcoin ETFs, in his reading, is real but still early: all ETFs combined hold roughly 4% of Bitcoin’s supply, and over 130 public companies now carry BTC on their balance sheets.
He frames that institutionalization in a broader monetary argument. Since the end of Bretton Woods, financial systems have leaned on continuous currency issuance, a pattern he says is under growing structural pressure from obligations like public pension systems. Against that backdrop, Bitcoin functions as attractive collateral precisely because it isn’t inflationary.
But Solovev is careful to place a ceiling on that framing: “The collateral function is today’s transitional stage. It’s important, but it’s not the end point. Bitcoin’s real potential is revealed only when it becomes a means of payment, and not just good collateral on someone else’s balance sheet.”
Large institutions are already lending in Bitcoin below the cost of dollar funding, which he reads as the opening phase of BTC as a credit instrument, not its conclusion.
Getting Holders to Actually Spend: The Behavioral Shift GoBTC Pay Is Betting on
The interview’s central argument is behavioral as much as technical: “My conviction is: Bitcoin is money. Not collateral, not digital gold on a shelf, but money.” Solovev connects this to a world he describes as increasingly integrated by AI, where the friction of 200 national currencies becomes harder to justify. Bitcoin, in his account, wins the role of neutral settlement layer by elimination rather than default: it has no issuer to devalue it, unlike stablecoins pegged to a national currency or state-issued digital currencies tied to a government's policy.
Getting there, he argues, requires holders to change their own behavior first. “It sounds counterproductive: for Bitcoin to succeed as money, holders need to start paying with it, not just accumulating it. But without this step, the asset remains collateral, not currency.” That is a notable admission from someone whose company depends on Bitcoin’s price, and Solovev doesn’t dress it up: he’s asking the exact audience GoMining serves to change how it treats the asset.
He also draws a direct historical parallel to explain who pays for that transition. The shift from cash to cards wasn’t voluntary or free: banks and card networks subsidized it for years because every transaction generated a fee and the network became more valuable as it grew. GoMining founder argues the equivalent subsidizer for Bitcoin payments won’t be governments, which he calls “a neutral or restrained observer,” but large, cross-border corporations facing currency fragmentation and compliance costs across dozens of jurisdictions.
This is the thesis behind GoBTC Pay, which Solovev describes plainly: “We laid the rails and raised the flag, and now we’re waiting for it to be picked up by those for whom it’s most advantageous.”
Inside the Bitcoin Payment Solution: a Private Mining Pool and an Honest Multisig Compromise
Solovev is direct about what it took to make Bitcoin payments practical rather than theoretical. GoBTC Pay runs on a private mining pool that bypasses Layer 2 entirely, settling real Bitcoin on the original network rather than routing it through wrapped assets or third-party nodes, as Lightning network does. Merchants pay a 0.2% fee, split between connected wallet owners and the pool’s miners. That structure is also why the product needs a non-custodial compromise: a 2-of-3 multisig setup where GoMining holds one signing key.
Rather than claim full decentralization, Solovev names the trade-off directly. “I won’t claim this is equivalent to pure single-key self-custody, it isn’t, and the audience knows that... It’s a compromise for the sake of speed and convenience on Layer-1, and I consider it justified for the task of retail payments.”
He adds that user funds are only touched at the moment a transaction enters the mempool, that any two of the three keys are required to move funds, and that the design has an incidental privacy benefit: transactions become visible only at execution, which he says addresses deanonymization concerns raised by holders of larger balances.
The same engineering logic extends to mining infrastructure. GoMining was the first company to mine a block using Stratum V2, a protocol Solovev says shifts control over block construction to miners and, run through a private mempool, makes transactions harder to trace. He expects this model, along with sovereign, country-level mining pools, to become more common as block rewards continue to shrink and competition shifts from subsidies to transaction fees and control over block space.
From Block Subsidies to Payment Rails: Mining’s Next Act and GoMining’s Roadmap
Kirill Solovev puts the mining industry itself inside this same transition. He argues mining is undervalued relative to Bitcoin, noting that Bitcoin’s market capitalization is currently smaller than Nvidia’s alone, and that mining trades at a discount even to BTC’s own price. His advice to miners navigating bitcoin halvings and rising competition for electricity from AI data centers is not to scale back but to build toward the payment flow: “Miners should not wind down but keep building infrastructure and learning to service the payment flow, that's exactly where the new economy appears, beyond the block subsidy.”
Geographically, he expects bitcoin mining to keep concentrating around the United States and the UAE, with large corporations eventually building their own data centers to secure their own payment infrastructure.
When asked about the outlook, Solovev names three priorities for GoMining beyond payments: a lending and yield business built around Bitcoin held as collateral, AI agents transacting on Bitcoin without transaction fees, and an expanded marketplace. On the AI angle, he offers one of the interview's more distinctive lines: “AI computation runs on electricity, and the Bitcoin network runs on electricity. To my mind, it’s the only genuinely honest pairing.” On the marketplace, currently limited to secondary sales of digital bitcoin miners, he points to a familiar playbook: “Just as Amazon started by selling books, we can start selling other goods for Bitcoin beyond miners.”
Closing Thoughts
Throughout the conversation, GoMining founder Kirill Solovev framed Bitcoin’s path to becoming a global means of payment as a probability the company is building toward, not a guaranteed outcome, and he closes with the same instruction he opens with: hold Bitcoin, but also start spending it, and get used to thinking in satoshis rather than dollars.
