Welcome back to “TON Innovators,” our blog series that explores the innovations and breakthroughs happening within the TON Community. TON goes beyond being just a blockchain; it’s a group of enthusiasts and experts committed to advancing Web3 technology as a whole.

This series celebrates the minds behind TON’s projects, focusing on their stories, challenges faced, and what drives them. Each episode of “TON Innovators” takes you behind the scenes to showcase the impacts and visions of those at the forefront of TON, combining technical insights with personal stories.

Our latest feature is on GoMining, a platform revolutionizing Bitcoin mining by using Liquid Bitcoin Hashrate with NFTs to improve accessibility, efficiency, and environmental sustainability. Discover where GoMining has come from and the idea behind their latest TON-native NFT series in our exclusive interview with GoMining CEO, Mark Zalan. Enjoy!

GoMining

This interview is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement, approval, or recommendation of the project. The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of the TON Foundation. This is not an investment advice.

We’ve digitized and simplified access to the excellent economics of Bitcoin mining for our customers. Traditionally, Bitcoin mining has been an energy-intensive process requiring expensive equipment and technical expertise, primarily available to well-funded corporations. We removed those barriers by offering modular ownership of mining power starting with as little as $25 for 1 TH/s-powered NFT. In practical terms, we tokenized Bitcoin hashpower using NFTs. By purchasing NFTs that represent real hashpower, and provide commensurate Bitcoin mining rewards, anyone can participate in Bitcoin mining without the significant upfront costs and technical complexities.

Moving on, could you break down how Bitcoin mining works at GoMining? How do NFTs fit into this, and what are the benefits of integrating them?

We have nine Bitcoin mining data centers operating around the world with over 3,000,000 TH/s of hashpower. This hashpower is tokenized via NFTs. By purchasing NFTs, our users acquire ownership of the hashpower the NFT represents and the Bitcoin mining rewards generated by that hashpower on a daily basis. In this way, NFTs represent ownership of real-world assets.

TON is one of the fastest growing blockchain ecosystems in the world, and we have been keeping track and administering your progress for a while now. A collaboration is a great way to leverage each other’s progress and expertise to provide additional value for both user communities. Beyond the GoMining Whales NFT Collection, we also have other integrations under discussion now, so stay tuned for more announcements.

Let’s delve into how owning a GoMining Whale NFT equals owning a piece of real computing power in your data centers. How do you manage and keep track of this?

Liquid Bitcoin Hashrate is the protocol we created to facilitate tokenizing tangible hashpower, managed and maintained by service providers, using NFTs, which make purchasing, upgrading, and transferring ownership of associated computing power as simple and straightforward as managing any other digital asset. The differentiation, of course, is that owners of GoMining NFTs receive Bitcoin mining rewards every morning, in addition to enjoying the artwork associated with the NFTs.

Does the team come with a background in blockchain and crypto, or is this a new venture for you all?

We’ve been running a Bitcoin mining business since 2017, and GoMining as a new project has been under development starting in 2020, with a market launch in 2021. Seven years is a fairly long time in crypto, so you could say we’ve been around the block a few times by now, have seen our share of industry cycles, bull and bear markets, and feel quite comfortable and confident in our ability to navigate the challenges and opportunities in our space.

How does GoMining make sure its mining operations are secure and transparent?

This is a continuous challenge and a constant focus area for us. For obvious reasons we don’t like to go into too much detail, but in broad terms, we obviously focus on ensuring we are at the leading edge of everything related to the technologies and best practices around cyber security. Deploying, testing, and monitoring encryptions, multi-factor authentication, numerous penetration attempts, regular audit and pen testing, constant user training, etc. etc.

On the topic of the environment, how does GoMining address the energy concerns associated with traditional mining methods?

That's a great and relevant question. There are a number of ways to think about this topic, we’ll focus on two. First, we work with electricity providers in all of our locations to become part of electricity base load consumption. Because electricity providers cannot spin up and down electricity generation on demand, a constant concern for every electricity provider is ensuring there is always a constant load that is able to provide stable demand, a base load, on the system. By becoming part of the base load we help improve the efficiency of the overall system, working with the service provider to maintain power draw, or reduce consumption when needed for the best efficiency of the overall system. Secondly, we are constantly improving the efficiency of all components of our systems. Over the past 10 years, the efficiency of Bitcoin mining equipment has seen hundreds of orders of magnitude of improvement. This constant drive for efficiency reduces the industry’s footprint constantly, as well as provides technology innovation to the wider technology industry.

What are the benefits of buying an NFT through GoMining compared to more common ways of getting in crypto like buying Bitcoin or TON directly?

Traditionally, the economics of mining Bitcoin has offered significantly more advantages than a buy-and-hold strategy on Bitcoin. Prior to our GoMining product, participating in Bitcoin mining has been restricted to very well-funded corporate entities that could afford hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into data centers, mining equipment, high-price technical experts to manage all of those, etc. Our goal with creating GoMining was to remove those barriers and make mining economics accessible to everyone.

Finally, as we conclude, are there any upcoming plans or launches from GoMining that our readers should be excited about?

Our team is hard at work thinking through the next iteration of our products, as well as facilitating the explosive, double digit month-to-month growth we are seeing in the number of users, number of NFTs, and the amount of hashpower that is in demand throughout our ecosystem. Our detailed plans and key dates are outlined in our project’s roadmap on https://gmt.io. Please take a look and we look forward to welcoming everyone to our user community through our mobile apps, and social media.

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