I am CEO of BlockCypher (Catheryne Nicholson). I am posting this as an official statement from our company:

We at BlockCypher have agreed to host the Urocoin block chain on BlockCypher's infrastructure. This allows the Uro Foundation to leverage BlockCypher's platform and APIs. In return, the Uro Foundation has agreed to compensate BlockCypher for the development and hosting cost for their block chain.

We understand startups have to fight uphill for an ideal they believe in. We also believe in the opportunity for digital coins to back commodities. In that spirit, we are helping the Uro Foundation with the platform piece. BlockCypher's infrastructure was designed to host a multitude of block chains. What we are helping Uro with aligns with our vision of a world with multiple digital coins.

BlockCypher holds itself to the highest standards of integrity and transparency. Should it come to our attention that illegal activity or trade, gross misrepresentation, or outright theft has occurred, BlockCypher reserves the right to take appropriate action.

I don't think off-blockchain is the answer. This completely undermines and defeats the purpose of the block chain being an open ledger. You might as well be another Paypal. The reasons invoked for off-block chain transactions are that the merchants’ volume is too high for the block chain, that the fees are too high or that confirmation time is too long. For every single of those problems there are known solutions that aren’t detrimental to the block chain ecosystem.

Thought I'd share the news that BlockCypher added litecoin support (along with bitcoin) onto the same cloud infra. CoinDesk article http://www.coindesk.com/blockcypher-update-gyft-litecoin/

BlockCypher is a platform-as-a-service for crypto coins. It's exposed through simple web APIs and callbacks for developers to build Bitcoin apps. We rebuilt the Bitcoin platform from the ground-up and optimized it for high availability. Our up time is 99.99%. 

We just released our Transaction API. A transaction can be created in 3 steps:

1. With only an input address, output address, and the value transferred, we build the full unsigned transaction and the data to sign it.
2. You sign the transaction data (we do not store any private keys) and send us the signature.
3. We complete the transaction, broadcast it over the peer-to-peer network, and send it back to you.

For documentation on this and all our APIs, see http://dev.blockcypher.com/.