Jerry Yang, Tim Draper, and others invest a significant sum of money into a blockchain web services company.

BlockCypher issued a press release on its blog to announce that it has raised over $3.1 million “to seed [the] next-generation of block chain applications”. Some of the investors are well-known: venture capitalist Tim Draper, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, hip-hop artist Nas, and many companies working with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as well as the first women investors in the blockchain infrastructure, Jesse Draper and Shawn Byers, took part in the over-subcribed round.

The funds “will be used to expand geographic coverage, continue building innovative block chain services, and provide deeper analytics”, says the press release. In addition to this, the company will release an open-source block explorer to showcase four cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, litecoin, dogecoin, and BlockCypher Testnet.

BlockCypher, located in San Mateo, California, specializes in helping developers build, monitor, and secure blockchain applications of all kinds with the help of a cloud-based technology system. According to its blog, BlockCypher processes half a million events per day and has customers all over the world, including Palarin, a Philippine remittance company. One of BlockCypher’s products cuts the time needed to process bitcoin transactions to a few seconds.