Dear Harvard: You Bought Bitcoin Wrong

Love, a Cornell ’10 grad

Harvard owns Bitcoin now — sort of.

Harvard’s latest 13F filing, a quarterly disclosure required for institutions managing over $100 million, is a remarkable bit of financial anthropology: Bitcoin is now Harvard’s largest public holding. In the span of a decade, we’ve gone from “Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme” to “Bitcoin is the largest directly held asset for America’s most prestigious university.” That’s a profound shift in the Overton window.

As of Sept 30, 2025.

And yet, even though Bitcoin is Harvard’s now largest public holding…

Harvard’s doesn’t actually own any bitcoin.¹

It owns a Bitcoin ETF.

Specifically the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, ticker $IBIT.²

Harvard is by no means alone in its sloppiness. Brown University has also purchased substantial amounts of $IBIT.³ Emory University more than doubled its holdings of the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (ticker $BTC) in Q3.⁴ Heck, state pensions from Michigan to Florida now have Bitcoin exposure through the spot ETFs or via public companies holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets. You’re also starting to see the same dynamic play out at the country level — the UAE, Norway, and others have indirect Bitcoin exposure through their sovereign wealth funds.⁵

What is truly mind boggling is that the indirectness of the Bitcoin exposure is being described as a virtue. Take this quote from the Harvard Crimson: “Unlike directly holding cryptocurrency, the funds trade on public exchanges and track market prices, allowing institutions to gain exposure without the operational challenges of direct ownership.”⁶ This sounds prudent and responsible but is anything but. Have we become so assimilated to the financialization and securitization of our lives that we have lost sight of what ownership, one of Locke’s three natural rights, actually means?

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Exposure Is Not Ownership

Let’s give Harvard, Brown, Emory, and anyone else doing the same thing, some credit, pun unintended. (And for all I know they own lots more Bitcoin with direct custody, though I sincerely doubt it.) They’re recognizing Bitcoin as a legitimate asset. They’re acknowledging that the monetary order is shifting, that the U.S. fiscal position is deteriorating, that the dollar is being challenged and pressured by a multipolar world, that inflation is not transitory but endemic, and that young donors may increasingly own Bitcoin and expect institutional fluency around it. They’re responding to a world where inflation, fiscal slippage, and geopolitical fragmentation have become structural rather than cyclical.

I myself was embarrassingly late to this party, but as I wrote a few months ago, I’ve started coming around.⁷

Even so, they’re making a category error so big you could drive the Strategy, Inc. (the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin) corporate treasury through it.

If you are buying Bitcoin as…

• a hedge against monetary debasement,

• a long-duration reserve asset,

• insurance against political or fiscal instability, or

• a store of value uncorrelated to the solvency of any institution,

…then owning “Bitcoin exposure” is functionally useless.

In other words: The problem is not that endowments are adding Bitcoin. The problem is how they’re adding it — and how they aren’t.

An ETF gives you the price chart, but none of the qualities that make Bitcoin worth holding in the first place. (And hey, it’s a nice chart! Can’t argue with that.) But if what you’re worried about is inflation, political instability, or the long-run solvency of a financial system creaking under the weight of its own contradictions, then getting “Bitcoin exposure” through an ETF is like buying insurance against a house fire issued by a company you suspect might burn down, or like backing up your computer onto your computer. It’s an intellectual contradiction. You’re putting your “escape hatch” inside the system you are trying to hedge. Bitcoin was designed to let you opt out of systemic fragility, not embed your hedge inside it.

Instead of treating Bitcoin like the monetary unicorn that it is, Harvard is treating it like Nvidia. But you don’t buy Nvidia because you think the US government might lose credibility. You buy Nvidia because you think the number will go up. Bitcoin can do that too, of course. But reducing Bitcoin to “number go up” is like reducing a cathedral to “a building with nice acoustics.” You’ve missed the point. An ETF gets you exposure. It does not get you sovereignty. It does not get you safety. It does not get you portable, censorship-resistant, un-seizable store-of-value money. It does not give you a direct economic good that is fixed, finite, and independent of fiat monetary debasement games. It does not get you generational durability.

So, congratulations Harvard!⁸ You’ve turned a hedge into a speculative side bet. Mazel.

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Why This Distinction Matters

Bitcoin was not invented to be a high-beta tech proxy. Bitcoin is a bearer asset, money without the need for trust, intermediaries, or solvency of third-party institutions. What you own is not “a claim on Bitcoin” or “the right to track its price,” but an actual piece of digital monetary property that only you (or the institution that controls your private keys) can move. Everything about Bitcoin’s design flows from that principle. It’s why it has become, quite surprisingly, the most powerful long-duration store of value created in modern (the history of?) finance.

But if you route your Bitcoin exposure through an ETF, you lose every non-price benefit. You give up sovereignty. You give up censorship resistance. You give up jurisdictional flexibility. You give up the entire value proposition that makes Bitcoin different. And, crucially, you take on new risks: custodian solvency, regulatory shifts, administrative freezes, and the usual alphabet soup of intermediaries that Bitcoin was invented to make irrelevant.

So the question for endowments is not, “Should we own Bitcoin?” They’ve already answered that in the affirmative.

The real questions are, 1) Why do we want to own Bitcoin, and 2) How should we own Bitcoin to achieve the answer to question 1.

If the answer is “speculative return,” fine. Enjoy the ETF. Critique withdrawn with apologies.

But if the answer includes some combination of “hedge, refuge, reserve, diversification, or long-duration protection,” then you haven’t bought Bitcoin. You’ve bought a derivative wrapper that performs well when the world behaves and fails precisely when you most need the underlying asset.

Bitcoin is not Nvidia. It’s not even gold. It’s something else entirely, and its custody model — its how — is the essence of the asset.

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How Institutions Should Actually Think About Holding Bitcoin

This is where the conversation veers into technical weeds, but the conceptual point is easy enough to understand. Small amounts of Bitcoin you actually plan to spend can/should live in simple wallets. But that’s not what endowments are holding, and it’s not what their risk committees are should be worried about.

Serious Bitcoin holdings—anything meaningful from a balance-sheet perspective—require an entirely different framework. And that framework looks a lot more like institutional treasury management than anything in the world of ETFs or broker-dealers.

This is the core argument of The Sovereignty Paradox by (Counter) Narrative, which every endowment CIO or Bitcurious individual should read.⁹ As Matt makes clear, Bitcoin has evolved beyond its origins as “peer-to-peer electronic cash.” It is now both:

1. A transactional medium, and

2. A generational store of value — arguably the most powerful one ever designed.

Those two functions require very different custody models.

Think of it like cash vs. savings. A little “walking-around money” needs to be readily accessible, so you sacrifice some security for the sake of easy access. Your life savings — the bedrock of any endowment’s long-term wealth — belong in a vault. If we’re talking about small, transactional amounts, i.e., the Bitcoin equivalent of coffee money, you keep that in simple, easy-to-use wallets. But that’s not how institutions or even individuals should hold large, durable, institutional, multi-generational balances.

Those require some combination of:

• multi-institutional multi-signature (MIMS) custody,

• MPC or HSM-based infrastructure,

• fiduciary-controlled title ownership (trust, LLC, foundation),

• legally recognized governance and segregation,

• and a structure that is bankruptcy remote, tax optimized, and operationally resilient.

That’s a mouthful, but the point is simple: Bitcoin asks institutions to decide not only what they want to own, but how they want to own it. And the “how” is where nearly every endowment is still flying blind. To beat a dead horse: If you’re holding Bitcoin for serious institutional or generational reasons, you must actually own Bitcoin. Not “own charts that go up when Bitcoin goes up.” Not “own shares in a regulated wrapper dependent on broker-dealers, custodians, and redemption mechanics.” Actual, title-held bitcoin. If you have long-term goals, the ETF isn’t good enough, because all you really have is a high-flying speculative asset, which is precisely the thing Bitcoin was designed not to be.

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The Uncomfortable Truth About Institutional Bitcoin Ownership

A serious investor can’t just “add Bitcoin.” He/she/it must make decisions about jurisdictional risk, legal structures, fiduciary control, succession, governance, and custody architecture.

And this is where the fiction of the ETF starts to collapse. An ETF is a way to avoid thinking about the very things that make Bitcoin strategically important. It’s a way to pretend Bitcoin is just another line item in an asset allocation model, rather than what it actually is: a monetary instrument that requires intentional design at the point of ownership.

This becomes even more glaring when you consider that no one should be thinking about Bitcoin in isolation. Bitcoin is part of a larger question, namely, what does a resilient reserve strategy look like in a world where geopolitical fragmentation is accelerating and fiscal challenges are structural rather than cyclical?

A modern reserve strategy doesn’t just say, “We own Bitcoin.” It asks:

What mix of assets gives us protection if the monetary, political, or geopolitical environment behaves in ways that traditional models don’t anticipate?

That mix might involve gold, high-quality non-USD currencies like CHF or SGD, and Bitcoin held in a structure robust enough to function across decades and leadership changes. A Bitcoin ETF cannot play that role. As is hopefully becoming clear, it provides price exposure without operational resilience, without jurisdictional flexibility, without continuity, and without sovereignty: all of Bitcoin’s volatility but not its virtues.

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Institutions Are Falling Behind

I’ve had enough conversations now with people who manage large pools of capital to know where the bottleneck is. It’s not ideology, it’s not lack of understanding about Bitcoin’s macro function, it’s not concerns about Bitcoin’s vulnerability to quantum-powered hackers in the future. Heck, even the Catholic Church is getting bullish Bitcoin! My friend Vance Crowe mentioned on X the other day that he was talking to a priest…about Bitcoin. The word made digital!¹⁰ (I’d make a transubstantiation pun here, but this is a family-friendly publication.) Bitcoin is practically passé now.¹¹

The bottleneck is ownership. Institutions and individuals alike don’t know how to hold this thing, and because they don’t know how to hold it, they revert to the only things that feel familiar: fear or exposure. The scaredy cats are sticking their hands in the sand and pretending like everything is going to be OK. The exposure cats assume that a Bitcoin ETF gives them the upside without the pain of learning what a new language. BUT, and say it with me:

Exposure is not ownership.
Exposure is not resilience.
Exposure is not strategy.

So even as people are waking up to the fact that Bitcoin belongs somewhere in their long-term resilience framework, they’re very far from understanding what responsible, durable Bitcoin ownership looks like. And the longer they delay, the more they confuse price exposure with a reserve asset, and the more likely it is they’ll get blindsided when Bitcoin actually performs the role they think they bought it for.

And very smart people are making this mistake. The people managing Harvard’s money are making this mistake. That’s the key takeaway from Harvard’s 13F.

I am not sure what the right Bitcoin allocation is, and besides, this is not investment advice. I can offer that the right amount as a percentage of your assets is probably more than 0% and less than 100%. (Helpful, I know.) But what I know with much greater certainty is that those that will look wise in hindsight are those who become fluent in Bitcoin — who understand its tremendous community and network power in a multipolar geopolitical environment — and start treating it as part of a resilient monetary toolkit.

That toolkit isn’t glamorous. Good financial stewardship usually isn’t. If you doubt that, don’t trust me, trust Shaq.¹² Good financial stewardship in an age of geopolitics involves legal structures that clarify title, custody arrangements that survive key-person risk, governance systems that can outlast CIO/adviser turnover, and a mix of assets designed to work together when the world becomes unstable.

Bitcoin is one piece of that. Gold is another. So are stable, high-quality foreign currencies. Together they can function as a shock absorber — a balance sheet that doesn’t evaporate when geopolitical or monetary conditions change.

But Harvard didn’t buy that. Harvard bought a Bitcoin chart. And that’s not a strategy, that’s just lazy. In the world we’re entering — a world where monetary architecture is fragmenting, where political legitimacy is in question, where inflation is no longer a solved problem, where institutions are under more and more pressure to satisfy a populist mob — strategy is what matters.

Some will eventually build it. Others will quietly look for people who already think in these terms.¹³ But the ones who do the work — who take ownership as seriously as allocation — will be the ones standing on the other side of this transition with their sovereignty, their solvency, and their wealth.

The irony of Harvard’s Bitcoin moment is that they recognized the future. They just didn’t buy the asset. They bought the reflection.

Let that be a cautionary tale. As if this guy wasn’t enough of one already.

1. Harvard Management Company could have additional direct holdings of Bitcoin that are not publicly disclosed (private, off-balance, not part of the 13F)…but I have not been able to find any evidence supporting that. If I did, or if they are, then any shade thrown in this post is undeserved, which is not to say, unworthy.

2. https://www.ishares.com/us/products/333011/ishares-bitcoin-trust-etf

3. https://thedefiant.io/news/tradfi-and-fintech/brown-university-7-2-billion-endowment-buys-105000-shares-worth-4-9-million-s-c26d112b

4. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/11/13/emory-doubles-down-on-bitcoin-with-usd52m-grayscale-bet

5. https://www.theblock.co/post/367169/norway-sovereign-wealth-fund-boosts-bitcoin-linked-holdings-standard-chartered

6. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/8/9/hmc-q2-2025-filings/

7.

8.

9. https://bespokegroup.io/sovereigntyparadox/

10. https://x.com/VanceCrowe/status/1990142973812801612?s=20

11.

12.

13. Hint hint:

https://bespokegroup.io/