With the growth of the STEEM blockchain, the role of the witnesses become more and more important too.
Especially when SMT's will come out.
I must say that even with the four men that make up our witness 
I am proud that our witness server has not missed a block and Steemify (the notification app for iOS) is doing extremely well.
In the financial department, the high SBD price is helping us a lot.
It's currently paying most of our expenses: 2 witness nodes (main and backup) + seed node + Steemify server.
Yesterday we made another announcement.
We are building a monitoring tool for witness servers and seed nodes called SteemTurbine.
Right now, we are testing this tool internally, smooth things out, but we will release it as Open Source via Utopian.io when we feel confident there are no major issues.
I talk about it more in my vlog.
I am a witness with our developer group for the Steem blockchain. If you want to support us I would appreciate your vote here.
We build Steemify a notification app for your Steemit account for iOS.
Get it Here:
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS