Harvard University’s endowment stopped reducing its Bitcoin ETF position in the second quarter of 2026.
According to The Block, Harvard’s latest 13F filing shows that Harvard Management Company kept its share count in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) unchanged at the end of the quarter. The fund had cut the position by 21% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and by another 43% in the first quarter of 2026. As of June 30, Harvard held 3,044,612 IBIT shares valued at about $101.4 million.
IBIT remained a notable holding in Harvard’s disclosed portfolio
By market value, IBIT ranked 11th among Harvard’s 19 disclosed positions and accounted for 2.4% of its $4.26 billion portfolio reported in the filing. Because IBIT fell during the second quarter, the stake’s value dropped by about $15.6 million from three months earlier even though the share count did not change.
Harvard’s gold-linked positions were larger than its Bitcoin fund exposure. Its combined holdings in the iShares Gold Trust and SPDR Gold Trust were worth about $171.2 million.
Harvard’s crypto exposure shifted from expansion to contraction, then paused in Q2
Harvard’s endowment oversees about $57 billion. The first public disclosure of its Bitcoin ETF position came in the second quarter of 2025, when it reported about 1.9 million shares valued at roughly $117 million. In the third quarter of 2025, the fund sharply increased that position to about 6.81 million shares, and the stake’s value at one point reached about $443 million. Bitcoin ETF exposure then became the largest single holding in Harvard’s public portfolio.
After prices pulled back, Harvard reduced the position by 21% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and by 43% in the first quarter of 2026. It also exited an Ethereum ETF position worth about $86.8 million, pushing its public crypto exposure back down to around $117 million. In the second quarter of 2026, that drawdown in exposure stopped.
Harvard’s financial backdrop remains part of the picture
The filing trend sits alongside pressure on Harvard’s finances. In fiscal year 2025, Harvard posted an operating loss of about $113 million. Federal research funding was suspended on a broad scale, and the tax rate on endowments rose from 1.4% to 8%, adding about $300 million in annual tax costs.
Private equity and hedge funds make up a large share of endowment assets and come with longer lockups. Public market ETFs are easier to sell and carry lower liquidity costs. The slower pace of selling in the second quarter came against that backdrop.
Other U.S. university funds mostly held steady
13F filings from other U.S. university funds showed a similar pattern in the second quarter, with most of them keeping positions unchanged rather than selling.
Dartmouth kept its positions in iShares Bitcoin Trust, Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF and Bitwise Solana Staking ETF unchanged. The combined market value of those holdings fell from $14.6 million in the first quarter to $12.4 million, with the decline entirely driven by prices. Brown University held about 213,000 IBIT shares worth around $7.1 million and also made no changes. The University of Illinois Foundation held a smaller IBIT position valued at about $640,000.
What these university investors had in common was relatively small crypto exposure as a share of overall portfolios.
Institutional activity outside universities was more divided
Beyond university endowments, second-quarter moves were less uniform.
Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, held 14,721,917 IBIT shares valued at about $490.1 million, unchanged from the end of the first quarter. That position ranked second in its 13F portfolio. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council held 8,218,712 IBIT shares worth about $273.6 million and also made no change. Together, the two Middle Eastern sovereign funds held about $764 million of IBIT. That total was down by about $118 million from the end of the first quarter, entirely because of the price decline.
Elsewhere, Morgan Stanley cut its IBIT position by about 4.5%. JPMorgan increased its IBIT holdings from 8.3 million shares to about 10.4 million shares and expanded its position in BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF by more than four times.
Harvard’s pause in selling lined up with a period of Bitcoin consolidation
The timing of Harvard’s decision to stop selling coincided with a stretch of relative stability in Bitcoin. After touching a low of $57,800 on July 1, Bitcoin spent nearly a month trading in a $62,000 to $66,000 range, without making a new low and without delivering a breakout rebound.
13F filings only cover directly held U.S.-listed securities and long option positions. They do not include private funds, directly held tokens or market-making inventory. Most of Harvard’s roughly $57 billion endowment remains in private markets, and only about $4.26 billion appears in the disclosed public portfolio. Even so, the direction of institutional positioning stood out in this quarter’s filings. A seller that had been cutting exposure for two quarters stopped doing so, while other university funds and Middle Eastern sovereign funds did not add fresh selling. With Bitcoin trading sideways for more than a month in the $62,000 to $66,000 range, that group of institutions that had previously built Bitcoin ETF exposure did not choose to keep exiting in the second quarter.
