Harvard Management Company fully exited its short-lived investment in an Ethereum exchange-traded fund and sharply reduced its Bitcoin holdings in the first quarter of 2026, scaling back the University endowment’s publicly disclosed exposure to cryptocurrency after a volatile start to the year for digital assets.
HMC sold all of its nearly 3.9 million shares in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust, according to a 13F filing submitted Friday to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The endowment had opened the position only one quarter earlier, marking its first publicly disclosed investment in an Ethereum-linked fund.
The firm also cut its stake in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by 43 percent, leaving it with slightly more than 3 million shares at the end of March. The reduction follows a 21 percent cut to the same position in the previous quarter, when Bitcoin remained HMC’s largest publicly disclosed holding.
The shift came during a rough quarter for cryptocurrency markets. Bitcoin posted its weakest first-quarter performance since 2018, falling more than 20 percent, while Ethereum-linked funds also slid amid a broader selloff in digital assets.
HMC’s first-quarter filing also showed a broader reshuffling of the endowment’s public holdings. The firm fully exited positions in Figma, the cloud-based design software company, and Klarna, the Swedish “buy now, pay later” payments company that HMC first added to its portfolio in 2025.
At the same time, HMC increased its exposure to artificial intelligence and semiconductor-linked companies. The endowment boosted its stake in NVIDIA by more than 81 percent and more than doubled its investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which became its most valuable disclosed holding at more than $232 million.
HMC also opened a new investment in Generate Biomedicines, an AI-focused biotechnology company, purchasing more than 1.1 million shares. The stake made Generate Biomedicines one of the endowment’s largest publicly disclosed holdings, behind only a handful of major technology and crypto-linked positions.
The firm also increased its stake in Broadcom by more than 47 percent, continuing a bet on the semiconductor company after more than tripling its holdings in the previous quarter.
But HMC trimmed several other positions, including Alphabet, Flutter Entertainment, and SPDR Gold Shares, signaling a pullback from technology, gambling, and gold-linked assets.
The change comes as HMC has increasingly shifted toward technology and venture capital. Last year, the company opened a satellite office in San Francisco — its first domestic satellite location in years — to strengthen its access to West Coast investment opportunities.
HMC spokesperson Patrick S. McKiernan declined to comment on the endowment’s investment strategy.
The total value of HMC’s disclosed public securities portfolio fell from just over $2 billion last quarter to $1.82 billion at the end of March. But the filing captures only a sliver of Harvard’s $56.9 billion endowment, excluding private equity, hedge funds, real estate, and other assets that fall outside the SEC’s reporting requirements.
—Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at megblon.50. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.
