GoMining’s CEO Mark Zalan (in image) speaks with CCN. : Credit: European Blockchain Convention 2025.
* GoMining has over 4 million registered users and powers over 10 million TH/s in Bitcoin miners.
* Bitcoin mining’s economic incentives will be less about block rewards and more about transaction fees in the coming years.
* Expanding Bitcoin’s ecosystem and the types of economic activity for its users is GoMining’s next focus.
The era of running one or several Bitcoin mining machines from your bedroom or garage has passed.
Now, it’s an industry of its own, with firms and governments around the world operating and owning giant BTC mining farms.
It’s also full of innovators like GoMining, who are working to make individual BTC mining and participation accessible, and hopefully, profitable, in 2025.
CCN caught up with GoMining CEO Mark Zalan at the European Blockchain Conference 2025 to discover more.
Bitcoin Mining Innovation
Due to Bitcoin halving events increasing the difficulty, time, and costly energy required to mine BTC, it’s no longer a profitable or worthwhile endeavor for individuals. Well, most.
So, is it making a comeback?
“Okay, that’s an interesting way to phrase it,” Zalan admits, and according to him, it’s still very profitable.
“The ebb and flow of difficulty versus the price appreciation” is expected to trend in the same direction it has been for the past 10 to 15 years, he explains.
It’s also dominated by wealthy entities and the capability to secure favorable deals on electricity and what they can build. There are also higher technical demands to be a profitable miner.
It’s no longer profitable to operate on your own. And Zalan explains that’s what GoMining set out to solve: making BTC mining accessible for regular people.
“We’re Bitcoin maxis”, true believers in BTC, he says, and now that everyone’s convinced it’s an incredible store of value, “we want to go beyond that and expand towards bringing other economic benefits on top of Bitcoin.”
NFT Miners
Cloud mining was the initial challenge that GoMining had to overcome, as that side of the industry came with “a lot of baggage” due to the many frauds and scams in the space.
How could anyone possibly verify that the Bitcoin miner they were renting out from an unknown platform was real? They couldn’t.
“So the story went: you send your money somewhere and you hope that somewhere in the cloud, somebody does something for you and you get some Bitcoin.”
It’s a huge leap of faith, resulting in massive losses for the average user looking to mine BTC.
So, GoMining looked to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their incredible utility (beyond collectibles), leveraging their unique, immutable, and programmable nature to build their digital miner products.
With this, they grant their users true ownership over their miner, one that rewards BTC on a daily basis, and which can be traded or resold by the user.
A Legacy System
Bitcoin is built on a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, which in 2025 is basically the Web3 equivalent of using MSN Messenger instead of WhatsApp.
Zalan admits that the likes of Ethereum and Solana offer technical advantages and better solutions compared to Bitcoin.
However, the key difference is that there are trillions of dollars tied up in BTC in terms of infrastructure and actual holdings.
Zalan, whose background is in banking, compares it to SWIFT, which is 1970s technology.
“It’s 10 generations past where it was when it was created. But you have 10,000 banking institutions on it. It’s embedded into the legal structures of every jurisdiction.”
Rightly or wrongly,” he notes, it’s still in use.
But it’s not bad enough, or “suboptimal enough” as Zalan puts it, to inspire someone to go build a completely different solution.
“And I think that sort of incumbents’ advantage is a lot of the reasons why many solutions are out there.”
He thinks that these elements are in play with Bitcoin to some degree.
There’s great work going on with Cardano, Algorand, Solana, and others, he says, but there’s trillions of dollars in BTC, “and that’s not going to change.”
Arguably, this would mean that PoW is here to stay, and things like Bitcoin Lightning and other innovations will continue to be built.
But what happens when the well runs dry, or, in two decades, Bitcoin is considered SWIFT-level tech?
“That’s a great question. You know, if somebody says they have an exact crystal ball, I’d like to borrow it for a couple of minutes,” he laughs.
Zalan says we can hypothesize with hindsight all we want, highlighting that in 2010, we couldn’t imagine we’d be standing where we are in 2025.
Zalan admits he’s amazed by Bitcoin’s self-correcting and self-stabilizing algorithm “in terms of the complexity of the network versus the price versus ensuring that the economics are still ‘there'”.
Later down the line, he believes we’ll tip into transaction fees becoming a bigger part of BTC’s economic equation instead of mining rewards.
“At some point, that’s going to start being the majority of the economic consensus for miners.” But, he doesn’t foresee major changes for another four to five years.
Competing With AI
However, there’s more to the Bitcoin mining puzzle than just participation; it’s a notoriously resource-intensive industry that consumes vast amounts of electricity.
U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to make the nation the world’s crypto hub, which includes making it the largest BTC mining entity on the planet.
Unfortunately, he also wants to make it the leader in AI, which also demands massive energy resources.
“Well,” he laughs, BTC mining competes with the next industrial revolution in terms of AI, right? And we’re competing for power, sites, talent.”
You can complain if you want, says Zalan, “which is a useless proposition”, or you can see it as “fun” competition.
Ultimately, he believes these technologies will complement each other.
AI agents , other tech, and the “whole universe” will need blockchain solutions that can handle billions of transactions per second, he notes, which is “maybe where blockchain’s besides Bitcoin come in to play.”
But for Bitcoin mining, Zalan, who studied history at university, urges us to step back and observe how humans overcome every great technical challenge.
“So whenever there’s enough demand, the supply will make itself available. So right now we’re in competition for electricity. We’ll find ways to generate that electricity.”
He notes that shifts and evolutions in renewable energies and other elements of the energy markets will contribute to this.
Looking to the excess energy held by Canada, the U.S., and other parts of the world, as well as the ever-improving data center tech that is generations ahead of what was available a decade ago, Zalan is confident that there’ll be enough power to go around for AI and Bitcoin in the future.
Panning Out
With all these technologies converging, the long-discussed “Fourth Industrial Revolution” appears to be coming together.
This was a buzzword thrown around in 2017 when initial coin offerings (ICOs) were booming and blockchain tech was being explored for every possible use case, no matter how redundant the ideas were.
However, if regular market crashes, regulatory problems, and energy concerns persist, crypto and blockchain may continue to struggle in a big way.
“In the short term, maybe.” Zalan ponders, “Longer term, everything tends to sort of work itself out. That’s the beauty of capitalism.”
Evoking Milton Friedman, he says that capitalism incentivizes people to figure out solutions.
“If you think of Bitmain, where they started from 15 years ago, it’s the difference between the cotton gin and flying to the moon with Apollo in terms of tech, expertise, and engineering.”
It might be a problem in the short-term, he says, but it also might not.
Time will tell, and the markets will decide.
Growing Bitcoin
With the future in mind, the next frontier for GoMining “strategically” is expanding the Bitcoin ecosystem.
He says that GoMining has roughly four million registered users on its platform, “at this point, we’re comfortable saying we’ve met the challenge that we were trying to solve back in 2021 when we came up with the idea.”
10 million terahash later, millions of people are receiving BTC rewards, he says, which wasn’t possible before due to the barriers being so high.
Now, GoMining users want something to do with the BTC they’ve generated, and GoMining is planning to expand its ecosystem to accommodate this demand. This begins with introducing yield staking options for users, and then, enhancing liquidity.
“If you can unlock liquidity, let’s say 60-70% LTV on Bitcoin that’s just sitting there now waiting for you to pay long term appreciation. That’s a huge economic value that people are looking to realize.
“We’re not being some sorts of savants here, we’re listenin to our community, they tell us what they’re looking for.”
The third stage will be payment cards “directly out of our ecosystem”, which avoids the on-ramp/off-ramp conversations with providers that result in costly fees and friction for users. “The constant theme is, can we spend that Bitcoin directly out of your ecosystem?” he adds, “so we’re offering solutions for that.”
“The liquidity product is in development now, the payment cards will arrive in a couple of months, and we’ve started to expand the built-in ecosystem wallet.”
Utility and Trust
Zalan intends for these products that improve and increase Bitcoin’s value chain and “everything you can do from an economic activity perspective around Bitcoin” both for its users and the broader ecosystem.
“We’re going further and further away from fiat money. Ten years ago, it was this ‘thing’ people were mining on laptops. Then the miners came along. Then we solved usability friction around wallets and secure storage. And the next step is, obviously, what can you do with it now that makes sense for people on an everyday basis?”
This is where GoMining will focus itself for the next four to five years, according to Zalan, who describes the ‘ecosystem’ itself as a “comprehensive sort of compendium and space.”
Indeed, these technologies need to interact and expand in a meaningful way, “right,” he replies, “and there’s a huge trust and security conversation around it.”
As the ecosystem grows with things like staking and liquidity, GoMining hasn’t yet established trust in those fields, but it’s in the perfect position to. For example, he adds, to engage with the products, “you have to take your Bitcoin that you’re keeping for the long term and have to do something with it to unlock liquidity.”
It’s another leap of faith to transfer it elsewhere, but GoMining is now positioned to say, “Don’t transfer it anywhere; you can keep it where it is.”
“If you want us, we’ll give you liquidity using that Bitcoin as collateral. And that’s a much easier conversation to have because, if somebody’s been mining with us for a year and they want to get liquidity on BTC that they’ve mined with us, it’s much easier for them to take that next step, as opposed to somebody with a noncustodial wallet that they have sitting on their ledger somewhere.”
So, whilst the Wild West era of BTC mining operations may be over, there are firms such as GoMining who are, at least, trying to do something different and maintain the spirit of democratized decentralization that Bitcoin was created on.
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