I've worked close enough to enterprise security infrastructure to know that Hardware Security Modules are serious equipment with serious price tags.
When OpenLedger's validator documentation started referencing HSM integration, my first reaction wasn't technical. It was practical. HSMs make sense in a data center run by a well-funded institution. They make considerably less sense in a bedroom running a community node on a consumer laptop.
The security argument is sound. Private keys stored in tamper-resistant hardware are meaningfully safer than keys stored in software. Validator signing operations handled inside an HSM reduce the attack surface in ways that matter for a network handling sensitive AI data.
My question is who actually deploys this in practice. Enterprise security at community node scale is an aspiration that assumes a participant profile the network may not have yet.