Harvard Management Company has reduced its stake in the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF by roughly a fifth in the fourth quarter and started a new position with a spot Ethereum ETF.
It held 5,353,612 shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust as of December 31, down from 6,813,612 shares in Q3, and reported a market value of about $265.8 million for that position at year-end.
Notably, the same filing lists 3,873,044 new shares of the iShares Ethereum Trust, valued at roughly $86.8 million, bringing the combined spot crypto ETF exposure to just over $352 million at quarter-end.
Diversification and positioningIndustry observers are divided over whether the reallocation reflects relative value positioning, diversification, or institutional constraints shaping Harvard’s digital asset strategy.
Harvard is likely “making a relative value trade with the belief that ETH is undervalued relative to BTC,” Sean Bill, co-founder and chief investment officer at Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, told Decrypt, adding that the endowment may have “a limit on the initial exposure that it can maintain in digital assets” and could have reduced its Bitcoin stake “to make room for a short-term trade in ETH.”
Still, he said the 13F is “a good tool to track the general sentiment of the filing entity,” noting that HMC "initiated a long position in BTC in Q2 2025, grew that position and held it through the downturn,” which in his view signals sustained long-term conviction in Bitcoin’s place in institutional portfolios.
“Harvard’s decision to trim its Bitcoin ETF exposure while initiating a position in an Ethereum ETF likely reflects a more differentiated view of opportunity across digital assets,” Jennifer Ouarrag, Head of Legal at institutional staking provider Twinstake, told Decrypt.
While Bitcoin remains “the primary institutional store-of-value proxy,” Ethereum “offers exposure to a broader smart-contract ecosystem.” Such a differentiation could signal that “a recalibration toward assets with multiple return drivers,” is in line, she added.
The move “mirrors recent institutional behavior, where allocators have rotated capital between Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs and shown increased interest in staking-enabled products that offer both price exposure and network participation income,” she said.
“One functions as immutable money. The other is programmable infrastructure,” Nima Beni, founder of Bitlease, told Decrypt. “Both belong in institutional portfolios, but treating them as substitutes risks misunderstanding their structural differences.”
Harvard’s trade “likely reflects regulatory clarity and ETF accessibility, optimizing for near-term compliance comfort rather than long-term structural positioning,” Beni added.
‘The thesis works’Some have described the move as a “textbook allocator move,” with Iva Wisher, founder of Bitcoin-native execution environment Midl, arguing that it reflects a move away from “single-asset crypto exposure” rather than a loss of faith in Bitcoin.
Someone at Harvard’s committee “might've just said 'the thesis works, now let's build a real portfolio around it’,” he said. “When a $50 billion endowment starts treating digital assets as an asset class rather than a single bet, that's a maturity signal.”
The trim “doesn’t mean they prefer one over the other, they’re a long-term investor and it’s more of a nuanced view of risk and opportunity,” Abdul Rafay Gadit, co-founder of Zigchain, told Decrypt. “The more meaningful signal isn’t the precise ETF weighting in a single quarter, but whether institutions are incrementally expanding their comfort with on-chain infrastructure over time.”
