Harvard is residence to high intellectuals, well-known alumni and, extra just lately, a large hoard of Bitcoin. The college has greater than $442 million {dollars} within the BlackRock-issued ETF known as iShares Bitcoin Belief (IBIT), which offers publicity to the cryptocurrency within the type of inventory, in response to filings launched on Friday with the Securities and Trade Fee.
In 2025, main firms and establishments have lined as much as put money into crypto, together with these from Wall Avenue, Silicon Valley, and more and more, the Ivy League. Brown College has additionally disclosed roughly $14 million in crypto ETF holdings.
Harvard has extra money within the Bitcoin ETF than it does in some other inventory, together with its stakes in mainstay firms like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon. Whereas half a billion {dollars} in IBIT is nothing to sneeze at, it accounts for lower than 1% of the college’s practically $57 billion endowment.
Harvard didn’t reply to a request for remark about its resolution to put money into Bitcoin.
Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, posted on X on Friday that Harvard’s funding in IBIT was “pretty much as good a validation as an ETF can get.”
The fund Harvard invested in, IBIT, is likely one of the first spot crypto ETFs to launch within the U.S. When it went public in January 2024, it marked the top of a greater than decade-long battle between the crypto sector and the SEC. It was additionally the primary time that U.S. buyers may put money into Bitcoin by their brokerage accounts, fairly than by crypto exchanges.
Even with a current droop in Bitcoin costs, IBIT’s complete market cap is nicely over $70 billion. Though Harvard’s $442 million stake in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF is yet one more signal of crypto’s rising institutional acceptance, a yr of wins for the trade hasn’t translated to an enormous value improve for Bitcoin. Within the final yr, Bitcoin has gone up lower than 0.5%, a fraction of the S&P 500’s 13% rise throughout that point. Bitcoin shot as much as its all-time excessive value of virtually $126,000 final month however is down roughly 27% to lower than $92,000.
