Harvard University’s endowment has disclosed a $443 million equity stake in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), making the fund’s largest known equity position in a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
According to the university’s most recent 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the investment fund held 6.8 million shares of IBIT as of Q3 2025. The position accounts for just over 20% of its reported US-listed public equity holdings.
Institutional investors, such as Harvard, typically avoid exchange-traded funds, preferring instead private equity, real estate and direct investments. That makes this transition to IBIT particularly remarkable.
For context, Harvard’s total endowment exceeds $55 billion, meaning the IBIT investment represents less than 1% of total assets. Still, it ranks Harvard among the top 20 owners of the fund, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.
The filing reveals that Harvard University’s endowment is investing in bitcoin. It comes at a time when the price of the cryptocurrency plunged more than 5% in the past week to around $96,000.
IBIT is the world’s largest spot bitcoin ETF with nearly $75 billion in net assets, according to SoSoValue data.
