Last weekend, Harvard Management Company (HMC) submitted its latest 13F holdings report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, showing that its position in BlackRock's Bitcoin spot ETF (IBIT) shrank by 43% compared to the previous quarter, while its investment in Ethereum ETF (ETHA) was completely liquidated during the same period.

In just two quarters, Harvard's public holdings in crypto assets fell from a peak of $443 million to about $117 million. As one of the top institutions managing the largest university endowment fund globally, this move raised market doubts: Even top talent cannot escape high buying and low selling?

In fact, Harvard's connection with cryptocurrency goes far beyond this. As early as 2018, several Ivy League universities' endowment funds showed a keen interest in blockchain technology through venture capital funds focused on crypto. Reports indicated that Harvard University, Yale University, Brown University, and the University of Michigan began quietly purchasing Bitcoin through exchanges like Coinbase around 2019.

Among them, HMC first publicly disclosed its holdings in the second quarter of 2025. According to the 13F document submitted that August, HMC held approximately 1.9 million shares of IBIT, valued at about $117 million, and simultaneously established a position in a gold ETF (GLD), holding approximately $102 million.

Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan interpreted this series of moves as a "devaluation hedge trade," simultaneously betting on Bitcoin and gold to mitigate the risk of global monetary overexpansion. As a result, IBIT became Harvard's fifth largest public holding, surpassing its holdings in Google's parent company Alphabet.

Entering the third quarter, HMC dramatically increased its position. By September 30, 2025, the holding of IBIT expanded to about 6.81 million shares, valued at approximately $443 million, with a quarter-on-quarter increase of over 257%. IBIT surpassed Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia, becoming the largest single holding in HMC's publicly disclosed portfolio, accounting for about 20% of its public U.S. stock portfolio.

At that time, faced with a continuous decline in expected returns on traditional assets, several university endowment funds were quietly adjusting their investment strategies.

Columbia Investment Management Company CEO Kim Lew stated that the expected return on traditional asset classes and alpha yields would be compressed, forcing institutions to go further along the risk curve. Carlos Rangel of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation bluntly stated that if they could not achieve an 8% return, the traditional foundation model would be unsustainable.

Meanwhile, even Harvard's own economics professors were feeling the heat. In August 2025, former IMF chief economist and Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff publicly reflected on his 2018 forecast failure — he had predicted Bitcoin was more likely to drop to $100 than rise to $100,000 within ten years, while at that time the price of Bitcoin had already surpassed $113,000, increasing more than tenfold compared to that year.

Rogoff admitted that he was "overly optimistic" about the U.S. establishing reasonable cryptocurrency regulations and underestimated the demand support for Bitcoin in the global underground economy. The public acknowledgment of an academic figure's mistake provided additional emotional backing for this wave of institutional buying. Meanwhile, Bitcoin approached its historical peak of $126,000 in October 2025.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, after the market peaked and then began to decline, HMC adjusted its holdings. The IBIT position decreased by about 21%, dropping to about 5.35 million shares, valued at approximately $266 million. At the same time, the BlackRock Ethereum spot ETF (ETHA) appeared in the report for the first time, with a holding of around 3.87 million shares, valued at about $86.8 million.

According to Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart, in this quarter, hedge funds were the largest net sellers of Ethereum ETFs due to the collapse of returns from basis trading. Harvard, on the contrary, entered the market during this window of opportunity, becoming the largest new buyer of Ethereum ETFs this quarter.

The latest disclosed holdings for the first quarter of 2026 show that the ETHA position, which had been established for less than a quarter, was entirely liquidated. Meanwhile, HMC once again substantially reduced its IBIT holdings by about 43%, leaving approximately 3.04 million shares, valued at around $117 million. IBIT also dropped out of Harvard's top five holdings, surpassed by TSMC, Alphabet, Microsoft, and SPDR Gold Trust respectively.

According to well-known crypto KOL Chen Jian estimates that HMC bought IBIT at an average price of around $110,000 and sold it at an average price of about $80,000, resulting in a loss of approximately 28%, with paper losses on Bitcoin exceeding $100 million. For Ethereum, the average buying price for ETHA was around $4,000, and when liquidated, it had dropped to around $2,600, with a quarterly loss estimated at over $30 million (-35%). In total, this round of crypto operations likely resulted in a loss of over $150 million.

Is this truly chasing highs and cutting losses, or is it just a routine rebalancing by the institution?

One perspective suggests that HMC completed its largest position increase near historical highs for Bitcoin, subsequently selling more as prices dropped, thus following a pattern of high buying and low selling. The Ethereum position was even entirely liquidated in less than a quarter, essentially capturing the entirety of the downward trend. This is characteristic of chasing highs and cutting losses behavior.

Another view points out that by the end of the third quarter, IBIT accounted for 20% of HMC's public portfolio, indicating a clearly excessive concentration. The subsequent reduction in holdings was a necessary risk control action; moreover, HMC still retains about $117 million in its IBIT base, rather than exiting completely.

However, this reduction must also consider the pressing realities that Harvard currently faces.

In October last year, Harvard's financial report for FY2025 revealed that due to the Trump administration's halt of nearly all federal research funding in the spring, Harvard incurred an operating loss of $113 million for the year, with total revenues of $6.7 billion, marking the first budget deficit since the pandemic. This deficit accounted for 1.7% of total revenue, contrasting sharply with a surplus of $45 million in 2024..

Endowment funds contributed about 37% of Harvard's operating revenue, with expenditures supporting around $2.5 billion for FY2025, but 80% of those funds were restricted by donors and could not be freely distributed.

Meanwhile, the Republican tax bill, which took effect in July 2025, sharply increased the maximum tax rate on endowment funds from 1.4% to 8%, with Harvard estimating an additional annual tax burden of about $300 million due to this change.

Under this pressure, the structure of assets itself determines where cuts are most easily made.

In Harvard's endowment fund, private equity accounted for about 41%, hedge funds about 31%, and these types of assets have long lock-up periods and high costs for discounted sales. IBIT and ETHA, being publicly traded ETFs that can be traded intraday, have the strongest liquidity and the lowest cash-out costs, making them natural priorities for adjustment.

Additionally, HMC's current CEO N.P. Narvekar revealed plans to retire around 2027 and is currently discussing succession arrangements with the board. In an environment where financial pressures, political uncertainties, and leadership transitions are overlapping, holding large positions in high-volatility crypto assets has become an additional reputational risk.

In contrast to Harvard's withdrawal, other institutions are making entirely different choices. Among them, the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala continued to increase its position in IBIT by about 16% in Q1 2026, raising its holding to approximately $566 million, marking its fifth consecutive quarter of increasing its Bitcoin ETF allocations.

Similarly, Dartmouth maintained its IBIT holdings without change and shifted its Ethereum ETF to a staking version, while also adding approximately $3.67 million to the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF, becoming one of the first U.S. university endowment funds to extend crypto allocations beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Brown University kept its 212,500 shares of IBIT unchanged, while Emory University exited its small IBIT position, shifting instead to increase its Grayscale Bitcoin Miners Trust holdings.

In summary, Harvard's recent actions are the result of a combination of financial pressure, liquidity requirements, and risk budget triggers, making it difficult to simply categorize them as chasing highs and cutting losses.

When the world's top university endowment funds enter the crypto market, they do so not with a crypto-native belief, but with the logic of Wall Street's risk ledger. Crypto ETF products indeed provide an entry for institutions, but during a contraction of risk, they also bring about institutional sell-offs.