Harvard University’s endowment has taken an unusually bold step into digital assets, revealing a $443 million investment in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) — a move that makes a spot bitcoin ETF its largest disclosed U.S.-listed equity holding.
The university’s latest 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows Harvard held 6.8 million shares of IBIT at the close of the third quarter of 2025. That position represents a little over 20% of the endowment’s publicly reported U.S. equity portfolio.
Such a large allocation to an exchange-traded fund is atypical for major institutional investors, especially elite university endowments, which generally emphasize private equity, real estate, and other alternative asset classes. Harvard’s embrace of IBIT therefore marks a significant departure from conventional practice.
Relative to the overall endowment — valued at more than $55 billion — the position is small, amounting to less than 1% of total assets. Even so, it places Harvard among IBIT’s top 20 shareholders, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.
The disclosure confirms that Harvard is now directly exposed to bitcoin, even as the asset has pulled back more than 5% over the past week and currently trades around $96,000.
IBIT, meanwhile, retains its standing as the world’s largest spot bitcoin ETF, with roughly $75 billion in net assets, according to SoSoValue data.
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