The leading assignee in this dataset holds 527 of the 9,680 records in scope, with the field dropping off steeply after that – fifth place holds 365 and tenth place holds 113. The top five combined account for 22.9% of all records and the top ten for 31.4%, which means even the largest holders control a modest slice of a field with a long tail of smaller filers. The mix of leaders spans payment networks, cloud platforms and financial institutions rather than a single dominant chip vendor.

Filings rose from 719 in 2017 to a peak of 808 in 2020, then declined to 507 by 2024, a 31% drop from 2021’s 730 – the last span that can be read as a complete trend. Filings in 2025 and 2026 will understate real activity because publication typically lags actual filing by about 18 months, so this should not yet be read as a confirmed long-term decline. A clearer read will emerge once another full year or two of publications lands.

The large majority of records, 69.6%, carry an H04L classification for digital information transmission, and 45.1% carry G06F for general digital data processing. Business and commerce processing (G06Q) and wireless networks (H04W) trail at 16.1% and 11.1%, and the dedicated cipher-and-secret-communication class G09C covers only 2.1% of records. This tells a practitioner that most HSM-relevant claim language is embedded inside transmission or processing systems rather than filed as standalone cryptographic-hardware art, so a narrow search limited to G09C will miss most of the field.