Ciarán Smith 🪇🏴

Want to be profitable in this market? Setup your office right off the coast of the Strait of Hormuz.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to 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 if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

I don’t think people truly understand what’s about to happen with 𝕏 Money. This is Elon going back to his roots - back to x.com - and building what he always wanted in the first place: one place that runs your entire financial life. When he rebranded Twitter to 𝕏 in 2023, he said straight up that we’re adding the ability to conduct your entire financial world. He even said you may not even need a traditional bank account. Most people brushed that off. And now it’s becoming real. 𝕏 Money has already been live in closed beta internally within the company. A limited external beta is expected soon, and they’ve already secured money transmitter licenses in over 40 states plus DC. 𝕏 Payments is registered with FinCEN. Visa is officially partnered. You’ll be able to fund your wallet instantly, send peer-to-peer payments, move money to your bank, and eventually use a debit card. And I think this is just the beginning. This will probably start as a simple wallet where you can send money as easily as sending a DM. With this technology, you can pay creators, pay subscriptions, pay whatever bills, shop inside the app, get paid inside the app, and much more. Then, there will be high-yield savings, you can invest, you can get loans, have money market accounts, maybe even treasury access, cool smart cashtags that let you see live stock prices in your timeline and execute trades seamlessly, crypto integration, potentially full asset management… the list goes on and on… Elon literally said this is meant to be the central source of ALL monetary transactions. Bro… think about that for a sec. Your 𝕏 profile becomes your financial identity. Everyone you follow is already there. Everyone you interact with is already there. That social graph becomes your distribution engine. Like, you won’t need a separate banking app, no need for a separate investing app, no need for a separate payment app… this all lives where you already spend your time. Right here on 𝕏. Look at WeChat in China, which Elon always alluded to. Payments, messaging, shopping, investing - all integrated in one app. It handles $ trillions in volume and became deeply embedded in everyone’s daily life. Now 𝕏 is building the Western version of that, but with a more global reach, and xAI’s AI layered on top of all this. Before you call me crazy, you have to understand how big this opportunity is. Digital payments globally are measured in the tens of $ trillions of dollars annually. Even just capturing a small slice of that across hundreds of millions, and eventually a billion, users can change everything. 𝕏 already has the audience. That lowers customer acquisition costs significantly. Add fintech revenue on top of ads, plus float, plus lending, plus investing tools, and we’re talking about a completely different valuation profile. Now, $44B for this company looks like the bargain of the decade… this was one of the main reasons I invested in 𝕏. And if they execute the way they’ve executed at Tesla and SpaceX, this could truly fundamentally redefine how people handle $ . Most people today still see 𝕏 as just a social media app. I see it as the foundation of a financial system layered on top of a global network. Ultimately becoming the “everything” app. And this I believe is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Elon is calling this a game-changer. I believe him.

Feckin' goosebumps!!! 🔥 🔥 🔥 Fred again. x Mike Skinner of the Streets x Underworld

Google just wiped out countless startups with a casual launch on a random thursday

Unpopular opinion: Bitcoin won't have mass adoption anywhere near the scale people are calling for. At least not in our lifetime. Similar to gold, there will be believers, and there will be people who couldn't be bothered by it.

I spent a day with @naval. We talked for hours about wealth, knowledge, and happiness. As all wise people do, Naval changes his mind. Its all in the updated audiobook of the Navalmanack (just released today) for its 5-year anniversary. He made a few key updates on the principles of Wealth: - Wealth isn’t just “assets that earn while you sleep” - It is “the set of physical transformations you can affect” - Knowledge is the ultimate driver of wealth - Many problems are less about “Evil” than “Big” - Good products have surprising reach. They create solutions the creator never imagined - You can’t build judgment without experience - Learn from the specific to the general, not the reverse - No entrepreneur fears a new technology - Software engineers are getting more leverage than ever And a few new ideas on Happiness: - Your memories are interpretations, not facts. You can change the interpretation to suit your needs. - There are truly enlightened people all over the internet. - They’re very accessible. You can meet them and learn from them. - Trying to be a happy person just reinforces the self. Realizing there is no self is the path to enlightenment. - Acute unhappiness can be useful. Chronic unhappiness is an ego trip. - There’s no worse way to signal status than to try to buy status - Truth and love are the things we choose, even if they make our lives worse. - You can create love whenever you want by giving it - Stay healthy, get wealthy, seek truth, give love, create beauty. If you haven’t yet gotten the Audible version of the Navalmanack, it’s now more than twice as valuable. Get it now. Or, listen to the free version of our conversation on my podcast. Thank you for helping this book reach millions of people around the world.