Carl Moon at Dubai Watch Week 2026 with his Jacob & Co watch
Dubai Watch Week has just concluded its 2025 edition at Burj Park next to Dubai Mall, and organizers are already positioning the 2026 show as the next step in the event’s rapid expansion. What began a decade ago as a regional gathering for enthusiasts and independent brands has grown into one of the most watched matches on the calendar. Recent editions have drawn tens of thousands of visitors and more than ninety brands, making Dubai a serious counterweight to Geneva in the world of watch fairs. Among the collectors and creators who walked the 2025 halls was YouTube and social media personality Carl Moon. Known primarily for his cryptocurrency content and mindset videos, he spent part of the week documenting his own watches, including a Jacob & Co piece built around a seven-digit NFT, as well as pieces he came across around the Burj Khalifa and the new Burj Park arena.
From DIFC to Burj Park, Dubai Watch Week 2025 marked a shift in scale
Previous editions of Dubai Watch Week were staged at The Gate in the Dubai International Financial Centre, with a layout that mixed brand stores, watch forums and temporary structures built especially for the show. By 2023, the event had already grown to its largest version to date, attracting more than twenty-three thousand visitors and increasing attendance by more than forty percent compared to the previous edition. For 2025, the fair moved to an expanded footprint at the Dubai Mall and Burj Park under the Burj Khalifa. The new location allowed for larger standalone brand spaces, more masterclasses and a wider independent section. Reports from organizers and local media point to some ninety participating brands and crowds approaching thirty thousand visitors, confirming the fair’s transition from regional meeting to a major international event with free public access but exhibition fees on par with the largest fairs. Dubai Watch Week 2026, scheduled for November in Downtown Dubai, is being marketed as a continuation of that growth, with preview materials detailing a further increase in brands and programming.
YouTube star Carl Moon’s personal watch collection and his million dollar NFT Jacob & Co piece
In the days surrounding the fair, Carl Moon published a video that walked viewers through several of his own watches. He started with a Rolex Day-Date, which he says he acquired for about twenty-one thousand dollars, and described it as his first serious foray into high-end watches. He then moved on to a Patek Nautilus, a piece he remembers paying about one hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars for, positioning it as a defining purchase that marked the moment he began to see watches as assets as much as accessories.
The centerpiece of the video was a Jacob & Co watch built around a CryptoPunk NFT. When Moon bought it, he says the embedded NFT alone had a market value close to a million dollars. The watch combines a digital collector’s item with a limited-edition physical timepiece from one of the most visually ambitious manufacturers in contemporary horology. For Moon, whose career was built in cryptocurrency and digital assets, the work reads as both a statement of identity and an experiment in how the chain’s value can be expressed in traditional, mechanical form. He acknowledges that the price of NFTs has moved with the broader crypto market. The logic he outlines is simple: if digital asset prices rise again, the Jacob & Co piece, as a combination of rare watch and significant NFT, can be valued as a single, indivisible object.
Carl Moon’s Jacob & Co watch, with a $1,000,000 NFT
The extremely rare Jacob & Co Billionaire Line and “Billionaire 2” watch
Separately from his own collection, Moon has also filmed one of Jacob & Co’s most extreme creations, an ultra-rare piece in the Billionaire watch family. In a new video, Carl tries on a seven million dollar watch known as “Billionaire” and it’s fully configured version known as “Billionaire 2”, reaching around 8.8 million in value. Carl pays attention to details that generally only serious collectors and industry insiders discuss.
The “Billionaire” and “Billionaire 2” watches feature a full pavé diamond setting accompanied by architectural skeletonization. Even a small change to the bracelet means removing links that he values at about two hundred thousand dollars each. To give his audience a point of reference, he compares the watch’s total value to the cost of several Bugattis or a large cryptocurrency portfolio. That video provides context for his post from Dubai Watch Week 2025, in which he is seen wearing a domed Jacob & Co model and tagging the brand, its founder Jacob Arabo and its regional operations as he walks through Downtown Dubai and around the Burj Khalifa. The film ties his private fundraising habits to the public event without making him the center of the fair.
How Carl Moon’s crypto background bleeds into his watch choices
Moon’s watch preferences reflect his professional history. His breakout year came from making early, high-conviction bets in cryptocurrency and building an audience around those decisions. The Jacob & Co piece featuring a CryptoPunk sits at the intersection of that world and the traditional craft of mechanical watchmaking. By keeping an NFT that once passed the million mark inside a complex mechanical casing, he effectively treats the watch as a frame for a digital work of art. The NFT’s floor price and the watch’s own desirability move on different curves, but in combination they create a hybrid object whose value is tied to both markets. For a segment of his audience that understands crypto more than tourbillons, the Jacob & Co piece serves as a bridge to horology. For those already steeped in watches, it’s an example of how the asset class is evolving.
Carl Moon x Christian Louboutin, Burj Park and the visual language around Dubai Watch Week
In pictures taken during Dubai Watch Week 2025, Moon is seen wearing Christian Louboutin sneakers as he walks along the Burj Khalifa promenade and circulates near the Burj Park arena. He tagged the French shoe brand in the same post that mentions Jacob & Co. The red-soled shoes have long been part of Dubai’s luxury streetwear landscape and sit comfortably alongside the range of watches showcased at the event. These images underline an important part of Dubai Watch Week’s appeal. The fair is not just about closed industry meetings. It is staged in a place where the public, visiting collectors and online personalities move through the same space, blurring the line between trade event and cultural festival.
Carl Moon wears Christian Louboutin shoes on the day of his Dubai Watch Week participation
Why Dubai Watch Week matters as the 2026 edition approaches
Reports from recent editions of Dubai Watch Week highlight that the fair remains non-commercial in its structure, with no on-site direct sales, in contrast to older fair models. Exhibitors pay for space, but visitors enter for free. Horology forums, debates, masterclasses and hands-on sessions run alongside brand booths, giving enthusiasts access to watchmakers often unavailable elsewhere. With the 2025 edition now completed at its expanded Burj Park venue and the 2026 edition already being marketed with promises of a larger footprint and programming, Dubai Watch Week has clearly moved beyond its early niche. It serves as both a showcase for technological innovation and a social hub for a community that mixes traditional collectors, buyers of new riches from across the region, and digital figures like Carl Moon. For Moon, the week offered a backdrop to show how his own collection fits into that world: a Rolex Day-Date as a starting point, a Patek Nautilus as an early step in value, a Jacob & Co watch with a seven-digit NFT at its core, and an interest in ultra-rare pieces like the $8.8 million Billionaire example. For the event itself, he was simply an attendee among thousands, another sign of how far Dubai Watch Week has traveled from a local gathering to a trade show that now shapes the conversation around high-end watch culture, and is already looking ahead to what 2026 will bring.
