I used to tell people I got in early. Turns out getting in early just means you lose money first.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. Sounds impressive until you realize none of it actually existed—just numbers on servers that eventually shut down. That's what the metaverse real estate crash really looks like when you're living through it.

I own eleven properties scattered across four platforms. Three in Decentraland, four in The Sandbox, two in Voxels, and one in Otherside. There's also an oceanfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I dropped $214k on because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." Spoiler: the frontier closed. It's a mobile app now. My beachfront view is now a mobile app.

When I started buying in November 2021, everyone was doing it. Someone paid $450,000 just to live next to Snoop Dogg in a video game. The virtual avatars didn't even have legs yet. I remember thinking that was actually bullish. "The legs are on the roadmap," I told Discord groups with complete confidence. Three hundred people spammed rocket emojis. I updated my Twitter bio: "Digital Real Estate Tycoon." Added it to LinkedIn. Went on a podcast with eleven listeners—three were bots, the rest were my alt accounts.

The community had this beautiful way of justifying everything. We called it "diamond hands." Translation: even if your investment drops 94%, you absolutely will not sell because selling would mean admitting you were wrong. We repackaged financial paralysis as a personality trait and everyone bought into it.

Our DAO had nine members. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading proposals. The other four? That was me and my alt accounts. I voted unanimously to acquire strategic land parcels. I made a spreadsheet predicting 40x returns by 2025. One slide just said "We are building a digital economy" with a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model.

Then the metaverse real estate market started imploding. Gucci withdrew from Decentraland in 2023. The store's still there—like some dead mall in Ohio but worse, without even a food court. I didn't sell. Diamond hands, right? My most valuable asset became worthless overnight. I just held it and told myself I was being strategic.

I also bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I still use it as my profile picture. When people ask about it, I say I'm "bullish long-term." What that actually means is: if I sell, I'll cry in a Panera bakery. My mom asked why I spent more on a cartoon monkey than her car. I said she didn't understand Web3. She said all she knew was I live in a studio apartment. She wasn't in my Discord group.

Meanwhile, Meta burned through $84 billion on this entire vision. Let me repeat that: $84 billion. More than Luxembourg's GDP. They poured money into a platform with legless avatars, graphics that looked like a 2006 Wii game, and fewer concurrent users than a Chipotle at lunch. Reality Labs lost 10 billion in 2021, 14 billion in 2022, 16 billion in 2023, 18 billion in 2024, and 19 billion in 2025. That's not strategy—that's speedrunning into bankruptcy. This year they laid off 1,500 employees, closed three VR studios, and announced they're pivoting to AI. It took four years and $84 billion to figure out what we should have known in 2021.

So what did I do? I learned nothing. I'm now investing in AI-generated virtual real estate. The founder called it "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I have no idea what that means. I gave him $40,000 anyway. He had a 47-page white paper. I read the title and the token economics section, which was just a pie chart. I love pie charts—they make everything look planned.

The roadmap says: Q1 build community, Q2 launch beta, Q3 expand ecosystem, Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where people escape.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He asked for current market value. I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFT. He stared longer. I told him these were "cultural artifacts with provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401(k). I said that was "legacy finance." He asked me to leave.

The metaverse is dead. I refuse to accept this. I'm a digital real estate tycoon. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a cartoon monkey that cost more than my actual car. I got in early. Which is just another way of saying I made a mistake—except you can say it with more confidence.