A victim's account of a Yuan Universe real estate case: My $1.2 million has dwindled to just $6,400.
Author: @gothburz
Compiled by: Big Claws | PANews Lobster
My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.
But none of that money actually existed.
I'm not talking about any philosophical principles. What I mean is, they existed on some servers—and those servers are now shut down.
I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland, four in The Sandbox, two in Voxels, and one in Otherside. I also have an oceanfront villa in Horizon Worlds—I bought it for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg himself said it was "the next frontier."
Last week, this "frontier" closed its doors.
It has now become a mobile app.
Last year, I sent the same message to 340 people: "You have no idea how early we got in."
I stopped sending those messages later. Not because I admitted I was wrong, but because most of them blocked me.
I entered the metaverse real estate market in November 2021. Everyone was buying then. Someone spent $450,000 just to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in a video game. The virtual character in that game didn't even have legs yet.
Yes, those virtual characters don't have legs.
But I think this is actually a good omen.
"The legs will come eventually," I told everyone in the Discord group. "The legs are on the product roadmap." Three hundred people immediately replied with rocket emojis.
I gave myself a title—"Digital Real Estate Tycoon".
I wrote it in my Twitter bio.
I added it to my LinkedIn profile.
I even went on a podcast and talked about it. The podcast had eleven listeners. Three were bots. The rest were my own alternate account.
My virtual properties combined are larger than my real apartment.
But in my actual apartment, there is furniture.
Location, location, location.
My most valuable asset is the land next to a virtual Gucci store.
In 2023, Gucci withdrew.
The store is still there. Nobody goes in. It's like some shopping mall in Ohio—but worse, without even a food court.
I didn't sell it.
Diamond hand.
That's what we often call "diamond hands." It means: even if your investment drops by 94%, you absolutely won't sell. We've packaged this kind of financial paralysis as a personality trait.
Someone in my Discord group spent $2.4 million to buy a 618 plot of land in Decentraland. It's a prime location with high foot traffic.
I asked him what the term "user traffic" meant for a platform with only 38 daily active users.
He said I didn't understand the technology.
Indeed, I don't understand.
But I still bought more.
We have a DAO—Decentralized Autonomous Organization. This means that everyone votes to make decisions.
There are nine of us in total. Three never show up. Two submit everything but never read the proposals. The other four are me and my alternate account.
We voted to "acquire strategic land parcels".
It passed unanimously.
I cast four votes by myself.
My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I predicted a 40x return by 2025. I made a business plan. One slide of the presentation said:
"We are building a digital economy."
That page was accompanied by a rocket emoji.
This is my entire financial model.
In 2023, I spent $189,000 to buy a Bored Ape NFT.
It is now worth $14,000.
I won't talk about that ape.
But I still use it as my profile picture. When people ask me, I just say, "I'm bullish in the long term."
"Long-term bullish" means: If I sell, I'll cry in a Panera bakery.
My mom asked me what a 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."
She said, "All I know is that you live in a studio apartment."
She's not in my Discord group.
Justin Bieber spent $1.3 million to buy one.
It's worth about $90,000 now.
I felt much better after hearing this news.
This is the power of community.
WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It — We will all succeed.
We say this every day. In group chats. When floor prices are plummeting. When transaction volume dries up. When 95% of NFT projects go to zero.
We will all succeed.
As a result, no one succeeded.
But we spoke with absolute certainty, even posting a picture of ourselves with laser-cut eyes . That's something, isn't it?
No, it doesn't.
But we say it counts. This is called decentralized consensus.
Meta has spent $84 billion on the metaverse.
I need to say it again.
$84 billion.
More than Luxembourg's GDP. More than the combined GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta. They poured money into a platform with legless virtual characters, graphics resembling a 2006 Wii game, and fewer concurrent users than a peak lunchtime session at a Chipotle in Des Moines.
They just removed Horizon Worlds from their VR headset listings.
It continues to exist in the form of a mobile app.
My ocean-view villa is now a mobile app.
Location, location, location.
Zuckerberg renamed the entire company because of this. Facebook became Meta. A company with a market capitalization of $900 billion changed its legal name simply because the CEO, after watching "Ready Player One," said, "I want that."
Reality Labs division: Losses of 10 billion in 2021, 14 billion in 2022, 16 billion in 2023, 18 billion in 2024, and 19 billion in 2025.
This isn't strategy, this is speedrunning.
This year, they laid off 1,500 employees at Reality Labs. They closed three VR studios. They shut down Supernatural. They coffined their entire VR social vision and announced, "We're transitioning to AI and wearable devices."
This transformation took four years and burned through $84 billion.
I've also changed careers.
I am now an AI real estate investor.
I bought a piece of land in an AI-generated, non-existent virtual world. The founder said it was " the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."
I don't know what this means.
I gave him $40,000.
He had a white paper, 47 pages long. I read the title and the section on token economics. That section was a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like it's all planned out.
This project has a roadmap. Q1: Build a community. Q2: Launch the beta version. Q3: Expand the ecosystem. Q4: No further information.
Q4 is always blank.
That's a spot reserved for those who want to escape.
My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.
I said: $1.2 million.
He said: Current market capitalization.
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 NFT.
He stared at it for even longer.
I said these are "cultural artifacts with a long provenance".
He asked me if I had considered buying a 401(k) retirement account.
I said that 401(k) is a "legacy of traditional finance".
He asked me to leave his office.
The metaverse is dead.
I do not accept this statement.
I am a digital real estate tycoon. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a seaside villa in a mobile app, a plot of land next to a vacant Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey—which cost more than my real car.
Location, location, location.
This area is nothingness.
But I got in early.
I always get in early.
It's the same thing as making a mistake—except you can say it with more confidence.
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