An Expensive Imagination: Metaverse Real Estate Wealth Evaporation

author:@gothburz

Compilation: Big Pliers | PANews Lobster

Original title: Metaverse Real Estate Victim's Statement: My 1.2 Million Only $6,400 Left

“Diamond hand” means: even if your investment falls by 94%, you will never take action. We have packaged this financial paralysis as a personality trait.

My peak net worth is $1.2 million.

But none of that money actually exists.

I'm not talking about philosophical reasoning. I mean, they exist on some servers—and those servers are now shut down.

I own 11 properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland, four in The Sandbox, two in Voxels, and one on Otherside. There's also a seaview villa at Horizon Worlds — I bought it for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg personally said it was “the next frontier.”

Last week, this “frontier” closed its doors.

It's now a mobile app.

Last year, I sent the same message to a group of 340 people: “You have no idea how early we entered.”

I stopped sending this kind of message after that. Not because I admitted my mistake, but because most of them blackmailed me.

I entered metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying it back then. Someone spent $450,000 just to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the game. In a video game. The virtual characters in that game don't have legs.

Right, those avatars don't have legs.

But I think that's a good sign.

“Sooner or later, there will be legs,” I told everyone in the Discord group. “Legs are on the product roadmap.” Three hundred people immediately replied to Rocket's expression.

I gave myself a title — “Digital Real Estate Tycoon.”

I wrote it in my Twitter profile.

I wrote it in my LinkedIn job section.

I also went to a podcast to talk about this. That podcast had eleven listeners. Three are robots. What's left is my own small size.

Combined, my virtual properties are larger than the apartment I actually live in.

But in my real apartment, it's furnished.

Location, location, or location.

My most valuable asset is the plot next to a virtual Gucci store.

In 2023, Gucci withdrew.

That store is still there. No one went in. It's like some shopping center in Ohio — but the picture is worse; it doesn't even have a food court.

I didn't sell it.

Diamond hands.

That's what we always say — “Diamond Hand.” It means: even if your investment falls by 94%, you'll never take action. We have packaged this financial paralysis as a personality trait.

Someone in my Discord group spent $2.4 million to buy a 618 plot of estate in Decentraland. Prime location. There is a lot of traffic.

I asked him what the term “traffic” means on a platform with only 38 daily active users.

He said I don't understand this technology.

It's true, I don't understand.

But I kept buying more.

We have a DAO — a decentralized autonomous organization. It means that everyone votes to make decisions.

There are nine of us in total. The three never showed up. Both voted for anything, but never read the content of the proposal. The other four are me and my little one.

We voted to “buy strategic land”.

The full vote passed.

I alone cast four votes.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I'm predicting a 40x return in 2025. I did a BP. One page of the PPT says:

“We're building a digital economy.”

That page was accompanied by a rocket expression.

That's my entire financial model.

In 2023, I spent $189,000 to buy a Bored Ape NFT.

Now it's worth $1.4 million.

I'm not talking about that ape.

But I'm still using it for avatars. When someone asked me, I said “I've been bullish for a long time”.

“Long term bullish” means: if I sell, I'll cry at a Panera bakery.

My mom asked me what Bored Ape is.

I said, “Digital art on the blockchain.”

She asked why it was more expensive than her car.

I said, “You don't understand Web3.”

“I only know you live in a studio apartment,” she said.

She's not in my Discord group.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's now worth about $90,000.

I feel much better after hearing this news.

That's the power of community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It—We'll all succeed.

We say that every day. Talk about it in a group chat. Say it when floor prices are falling all the way down. Say it when the trading volume runs out. Said when 95% of NFT projects went to zero.

We will all succeed.

As a result, no one succeeded.

But we're pretty sure; it also comes with a laser eye profile picture. This probably counts as much or nothing.

Doesn't count.

But we say it counts. This is called decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say it again.

$84 billion.

More than Luxembourg's GDP. That's more than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They threw money on a platform where virtual characters had no legs, the picture looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the number of people online wasn't as high as the Chipotle lunch peak in Des Moines.

They just removed Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It continues to exist in the form of a mobile app.

My sea-view villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, or location.

Zuckerberg changed the entire company's name because of this. Facebook became Meta. A company with a market capitalization of 900 billion dollars changed its legal name only because the CEO watched “Number One Player” and said, “I want that.”

Reality Labs division: loss of 10 billion dollars in 2021, loss of 14 billion dollars in 2022, loss of 16 billion dollars in 2023, loss of 18 billion dollars in 2024, loss of 19 billion dollars in 2025.

This isn't called strategy; it's called speed communication.

This year, they laid off 1,500 employees at Reality Labs. Three VR studios have been shut down. Cut down Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in the coffin, then announce: “We are going to transform into AI and wearables.”

This transformation took four years and burned 84 billion US dollars.

I've also transformed.

I'm currently an AI real estate investor.

I bought a plot of land in an AI-generated virtual world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was “the intersection of spatial computation and big language models”.

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a 47-page white paper. I read the title and the tokenomics section. That section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. It makes everything seem like it's planned.

This project has a roadmap. Q1: Build a community. Q2: The beta version is live. Q3: Expanding the ecosystem. Q4: blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's a place left for running away.

My accountant made me value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said: $1.2 million.

He said: Current market value.

I said: $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked me if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He kept an eye on it longer.

I said these are “cultural collections with long-term proof of provenance”.

He asked me if I had considered buying a 401 (k) retirement account.

I say 401 (k) is “a legacy of traditional finance.”

He asked me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept this statement.

I'm a digital real estate tycoon. I own 11 properties on 4 platforms. I have a sea-view villa in the mobile app, a plot of land next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey — it's more expensive than my actual car.

Location, location, or location.

This location is empty.

But I got in early.

I always get in early.

It's the same thing as making a mistake — except you can say it in a more confident tone.

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