Four things that will get your Cosmos validator slashed before you earn a single block reward

The most dangerous moment in a Cosmos validator setup is not the on-chain registration. It is the ten minutes before it, when your priv_validator_key.json is sitting unprotected on the validator host and you are about to run create-validator for the first time. Most guides walk you through the steps. Fewer of them tell you the specific things that will get you jailed or slashed if you skip them. These are four of them, from running validators on Cosmos Hub mainnet. 1. NVMe is not optional, it is the difference between signing blocks and missing them Every guide lists "4TB SSD" as a hardware requirement. What most of them do not emphasize is that SATA SSDs and standard HDDs will cause I/O bottlenecks under load that manifest directly as missed blocks. The chain data on Cosmos Hub has grown significantly. Under normal operation, the node is continuously reading and writing to disk. During governance-triggered upgrades, that load spikes. If your disk cannot keep up, the node falls behind