Investing.com has recently published a piece “Crypto Payments Are Growing Up - Here is What Comes Next,” drawing on several voices across the industry, and GoMining CEO Mark Zalan was one of them. The outlet sent multiple questions, and only a part of Zalan’s responses got into the final report. That’s how the format works. We decided to publish the rest from Zalan’s written responses in the GoMining blog, to make his stance on the topic clear and sound.
Two Payment Futures, Not One
Asked whether crypto payments end up invisible or whether crypto-native checkout still has a case, Zalan concedes most of the ground first. Nobody thinks about card networks when they tap a phone, and that’s exactly why tapping a phone won.
“Merchants don’t want blockchain exposure. They want to get paid faster, pay less for the privilege, and stop worrying about it.” Whatever delivers that takes the mass market, and the customer never learns what settled underneath.
Then he draws a line. “There is a real constituency that wants to pay in Bitcoin and settle in Bitcoin, and for them a payment that converts to fiat three times along the way isn’t a Bitcoin payment at all.”
Two models, not one: stablecoins vanish into the backend, Bitcoin stays visible where both sides want it. And a third user makes the argument moot. “Software agents don’t experience checkout.”
Why Only 0.2% of Euro-Area Online Merchants Accept Crypto
The European Central Bank surveyed 8,205 companies across the euro area and found only 0.2% of online sellers accept crypto, while mobile payment acceptance at physical locations reached 68% in 2026, up from 36% in 2024.
Zalan’s explanation is the bluntest thing in the set: “The barrier is that crypto checkout in stores, as offered today, solves no problem the merchant has.”
Mobile payments asked merchants for nothing: same money, same settlement, same accounting, less friction at the till. Crypto checkout proposes a new asset, a new wallet, a new compliance workflow and a volatility policy, in exchange for customers who mostly weren’t asking to pay in crypto. Merchants told the ECB their priorities were consumer preference, security and ease of handling. Of course it’s 0.2%, concludes GoMining CEO.
What moves the number is arithmetic. A merchant paying 2-3% to cards, waiting days for settlement and absorbing chargeback fraud has quantifiable pain. Fix that and adoption becomes a spreadsheet decision. “The industry spent a decade asking merchants to care about crypto. Wrong ask.”
The Concession on Remittances
In March 2026, Banca d’Italia sent real transfers of 200 USDC across ten corridors and found total costs of 0.3-8.96%, with the blockchain leg averaging 0.4% and the exchange, funding, withdrawal and currency-conversion steps producing the rest.
Asked whether that matched what he sees, Zalan didn’t argue: “Fair, and the industry should stop arguing with it, because the study measured the right thing.” A payment isn’t finished when the token moves. In reality, it's finished when the recipient holds money they can spend. “The chain is cheap. Leaving and re-entering the banking system is not, and most remittances do both.”
His read on what follows is the useful part. The cost sits at the borders between crypto and banking, so the advantage appears wherever those borders aren’t crossed: two parties who both hold the asset, businesses keeping working balances in stablecoins, weekend flows the legacy alternative can’t run, and machine payments where neither side has a bank account to return to.
Zalan also named his own industry’s cheat: “Compare balance-to-usable-balance or don't compare at all.” On that basis, crypto wins some corridors today and not all of them.
Machines as an Audit of the On-Chain Payment Rails
Coinbase’s x402 protocol handled roughly 14 million AI-agent transfers in a 30-day window as of mid-August 2026, almost entirely in USDC. Asked whether agent payments overtake human retail spending, Zalan says yes by transaction count, and sooner than two or three years. A person doesn’t notice whether a payment costs half a cent or five cents. An agent making a hundred thousand micro-purchases notices nothing else. “Machines are the first payment customer in history whose demand curve is set entirely by fees and finality, with zero brand loyalty and zero habit.”
What that requires is uncomfortable: fees approaching zero rather than merely low, finality predictable enough that software needn’t handle reversals, authorization that works as delegation with nobody clicking approve, and an API that is the product rather than a wrapper around something built for people. His conclusion is a warning. Machine traffic “will expose very quickly which rails were built for digital commerce and which were merely adapted to it.”
Who Wears the Market When It Moves Mid-Settlement
“Whoever guaranteed a price before settlement completed. That’s the entire answer, and every architecture is just a different way of assigning that party,” emphasized GoMining CEO.
With a crypto-linked card, someone in between carried the market while the price stayed locked, and charged for it. Stablecoins swap volatility for issuer and redemption risk, “a reasonable trade right up until the day redemption is questioned.” With direct BTC settlement the merchant owns the exposure knowingly, because that’s what they asked for.
Closing Thoughts
Mark Zalan’s argument across the answers is narrower than the industry usually offers: most crypto payment volume will be invisible and denominated in stablecoins. Bitcoin-native checkout serves a smaller market that wants the asset itself. The cost advantage is real in specific corridors and overstated everywhere else. And the customer that settles the architecture debate isn’t a person at a till.
For the visible half of that, the GoBTC Pay launch write-up covers the mechanics.
