Harvard is home to top intellectuals, famous alumni, and, more recently, a sizable hoard of Bitcoin. The university has more than $442 million dollars in the BlackRock-issued ETF called iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which provides exposure to the cryptocurrency in the form of stock, according to filings released on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In 2025, major companies and institutions have lined up to invest in crypto, including those from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and increasingly, the Ivy League. Brown University has also disclosed roughly $14 million in crypto ETF holdings.
Harvard has more money in the Bitcoin ETF than it does in any other stock, including its stakes in mainstay companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon. While half a billion dollars in IBIT is nothing to sneeze at, it accounts for less than 1% of the university’s nearly $57 billion endowment.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment about its decision to invest in Bitcoin.
Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, posted on X on Friday that Harvard’s investment in IBIT was “as good a validation as an ETF can get.”
The fund Harvard invested in is one of the first spot crypto ETFs to launch in the U.S. When it went public in January 2024, it marked the end of a more than decade-long battle between the crypto sector and the SEC. It was also the first time that U.S. investors could invest in Bitcoin through their brokerage accounts, rather than through crypto exchanges.
Even with a recent slump in Bitcoin prices, IBIT’s total market cap is well over $70 billion. Although Harvard’s $442 million stake in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF is yet another sign of crypto’s growing institutional acceptance, a year of wins for the industry hasn’t translated to a big price increase for Bitcoin. In the last year, Bitcoin has gone up less than 0.5%, a fraction of the S&P 500’s 13% rise during that time. Bitcoin shot up to its all-time high price of almost $126,000 last month but is down roughly 27% to less than $92,000.
