Harvard left its Bitcoin ETF position untouched in the second quarter of 2026. After two quarters of selling, the university endowment still held 3,044,612 IBIT shares at the end of June. The stake in BlackRock's fund was worth USD 101.4 million.
Harvard Management Company oversees the university's endowment of roughly USD 57 billion. It counts as an institutional asset manager with more than USD 100 million in equity. So it must disclose its holdings to the SEC every quarter. That covers US-listed stocks and options. However, these 13F filings show only long positions on the reporting date, not short sales. IBIT, BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, is the largest spot Bitcoin ETF on the market. Harvard first built the position up to a peak of 6.81 million shares by the end of September 2025. The endowment then cut it back to 3.04 million shares in two steps. At the same time, it opened a position in the BlackRock Ether ETF worth USD 86.8 million. The second-quarter filings reached the SEC in mid-August. That latest filing shows no further cut in IBIT, but a full exit from the Ether position.
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Harvard stops selling its Bitcoin ETF shares
The share count on the reporting date matches the end of March exactly. So the endowment sold nothing during the quarter. Still, the value of the position fell by USD 15.6 million, purely because of the IBIT price decline. A sale would have shown up in the share count, not in market value alone. Therefore the second quarter differs from the two reporting periods before it, when the drop came from actual sales.
Harvard originally held 6,813,612 IBIT shares at the end of September 2025, worth around USD 443 million. Three months later, at the end of December, the holding stood at 5,353,612 shares. The first quarter of 2026 then brought the larger cut to 3,044,612 shares, a drop of 43 percent. Overall, the endowment parted with 55 percent of its shares within two quarters. Both selling quarters fell into the period after the Bitcoin high of October 2025. Now the holding has stayed flat for a full quarter for the first time since the September 2025 peak.
On the Ethereum side, the decision went the other way. Harvard had opened that position in BlackRock's spot Ether ETF only in the previous quarter, at USD 86.8 million. It no longer appears in the new filing. The endowment closed it out entirely and opened no new Ethereum position. The Ether exposure thus lasted a single quarter.
Bitcoin remains a minor position at Harvard
Measured against the disclosed portfolio, the Bitcoin ETF stays small. The fund ranks only 11th of 19 holdings and makes up 2.4 percent of the USD 4.26 billion 13F portfolio. Considerably more capital sits in gold. Specifically, the iShares Gold Trust accounts for USD 149.5 million, the SPDR Gold Trust for another USD 21.7 million. Together that comes to USD 171.2 million, roughly 70 percent more than the Bitcoin ETF holding.
The filing covers only part of the endowment's assets. It captures directly held US-listed securities alone. Most of the roughly USD 57 billion, by contrast, sits in private funds with no disclosure requirement. As a result, the 13F form allows no conclusions about the university's overall crypto allocation.
The largest disclosed position remains Space Exploration Technologies. Harvard holds 12,935,100 SpaceX shares worth USD 2.21 billion, or 52 percent of the entire 13F portfolio. The space company has traded on the Nasdaq since June. In its registration, the company disclosed its own holdings of 18,712 BTC. That gives the endowment indirect exposure to further Bitcoin, which appears in no ETF line of its portfolio.
Institutional investors move in different directions
Other institutions were more active in the second quarter. Morgan Stanley cut its IBIT holding from 17.3 million to 16.5 million shares, a 4.5 percent drop in share count. The value of the position fell much more sharply, however, dropping 17.3 percent to USD 548.6 million. In addition, the bank holds 2.57 million shares in its own Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust. That fund started trading in April, and the position is worth USD 43.3 million. The bank's IBIT exposure is comparatively large, exceeding Harvard's holding by more than five times.
JPMorgan moved the other way and raised its stake from 8.3 million to 10.4 million IBIT shares. Furthermore, the bank more than quadrupled its holding in the BlackRock Ether ETF, to around USD 14.3 million. Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investment Corporation also bought and now reports 688,529 shares worth USD 22.9 million. The quarter added 109,446 shares. The same filing lists put options on IBIT with an underlying value of USD 23.8 million. Notably, that hedge exceeds the direct share position. Call options add another USD 4.93 million.
Nothing changed at the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds. Mubadala Investment Company held an unchanged 14,721,917 shares worth USD 490.1 million, the second-largest position in its portfolio. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council likewise reported an unchanged 8,218,712 shares worth USD 273.6 million. Together the two come to around USD 764 million. That is about USD 118 million less than at the end of March, at an identical share count. Before that, Mubadala had added in three of six quarters since its first disclosure at the end of 2024. Dartmouth College also left its three crypto ETF positions untouched. Their combined value fell from USD 14.6 million to USD 12.4 million.
The number of IBIT holders grows despite the price decline
The price decline shapes the entire 13F season. Bitcoin trades at around USD 63,000 in mid-August 2026, close to 30 percent below where it started the year. The price therefore sits at roughly half its October 2025 peak of more than USD 126,000. Nevertheless, IBIT managed around USD 47.35 billion in net assets in mid-August.
The number of institutional holders keeps growing. According to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, IBIT's 13F holder list now covers around 1,500 institutions. For Balchunas, other holders carry the more meaningful signal. He points to Tudor Jones, the UAE sovereign wealth funds, Harvard, Dartmouth and the Texas pension fund. By contrast, purchases by large trading houses such as JPMorgan or Citadel mean little to him. 13F filings do not separate proprietary holdings from client positions. At big banks and market makers, an IBIT line thus says little about their own market expectations.
Consequently, the season produces no uniform picture. Some houses are cutting, others are building. IBIT ultimately serves as a tactical bet or a long-term allocation, depending on the house.
