The Ivy League university held 6.8 million shares in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF as of Sept. 30, 2025, and has also boosted its exposure to gold.
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Harvard University boosted its investment in BlackRock’s Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by over 250% in the third quarter after the Ivy League school first bought into the fund earlier this year.
Harvard Management Company, the business that manages the university’s $57 billion endowment fund, in a regulatory filing on Friday that it held over 6.8 million shares in the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) worth $442.8 million as of Sept. 30.
The university that it had a position IBIT for the first time, holding around 1.9 million shares then worth $116.6 million.
“Super rare” for a university to buy ETF
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas on Friday that it is “super rare/difficult to get an endowment to bite on an ETF.”
“It’s as good a validation as an ETF can get,” he added, but noted Harvard’s IBIT investment was “a mere 1% of total endowment.”
was Harvard’s largest investment on its filing and was its “biggest position increase in Q3,” now ranking it as the 16th-largest holder of the ETF, according to Balchunas.
Balchunas in August after Harvard’s initial that endowments “are notably anti-ETF” and the “hardest institution to hook” when it comes to ETFs.
Harvard increases gold, tech exposure
The remainder of Harvard’s investments were primarily in major US technology companies, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
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The university also bought a new $16.8 million position in the buy-now, pay-later Klarna and $59.1 million worth of shares in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Harvard also nearly doubled its exposure to gold, boosting its share ownership in the , SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), to 661,391 shares worth $235.1 million, up from its 333,000 share holdings in August.
SoSoValue Bitcoin () ETFs saw net outflows of $1.11 billion in the trading week ending on Friday, as the price of Bitcoin fell below $100,000.
Bitcoin is now trading under $95,000 after falling to a low of $93,029 in the past 24 hours, which it had made so far this year.
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