There are considerably more steps involved for a website to accept bitcoins for payment than simply having a wallet address for payments to be sent to. A payment processor, in most circumstances, needs to generate bitcoin addresses, provide the order status at each stage and notify the website when the correct amount has been paid, so the product can be released accordingly.

Until now the only payment processors in existence, to do this important job for merchants, were also aimed at accepting fiat currencies. They include the popular services Coinbase, Bitpay, CoinOfSale, and Coinify. Not only do these processors usually charge a fee, albeit substantially smaller than any credit card processors fees, but they also have to conform to federal Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws, which require them to collect US customers' information and report any suspicious transactions to the US federal government.

Having to comply to a multitude of fiat-payment rules makes existing payment processors complex, and less useful for merchants who only want to add bitcoin payment processing to their website. Reluctant to sign up with one of these companies, many merchants have opted for placing a bitcoin address on their website. However, in doing so they forgo the extra services that would help their business. To solve this problem Mycelium recently introduced the completely free and open source software program, Mycelium Gear.