Author: Yanz, Liam, Shenchao TechFlow
In August 2025, Bitcoin's price crossed $120,000, and the once 'marginal asset' was once again pushed onto the mainstream stage, driven not only by Wall Street hedge funds but also by the most conservative and astute fund managers in Ivy League campuses.
On August 9, the SEC's 13F filing disclosed a market-surprising detail: Harvard University’s endowment fund (approximately $53.2 billion in size) held $116 million in Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) in the second quarter of 2025. This position ranked as its fifth-largest investment, trailing only Microsoft, Amazon, Booking Holdings, and Meta, and even surpassing the position ratios of Alphabet (Google's parent company) and Nvidia.
Harvard is not an isolated case.
Brown University, Emory University, and the University of Austin have all publicly disclosed their cryptocurrency positions.
The 'guardians of wealth' in these ivory towers embracing cryptocurrency is not a momentary impulse but rather the surface emergence of years of planning.
The capital, talent, and technology of prestigious schools have long rooted deeply in the crypto industry.
But this time, they were pushed to the forefront.
Investing in crypto during the bubble burst
In 2018, it was the darkest moment for the cryptocurrency industry.
With the collapse of the ICO bubble, the global market capitalization of crypto assets evaporated by over $630 billion, falling to less than $200 billion, with Bitcoin dropping to $3,000 and Ethereum to $80. Retail investors fled, and cryptocurrencies were labeled as 'Ponzi schemes', with even Facebook announcing a ban on crypto-related ads.
At this moment when everyone was avoiding it, Yale University's endowment fund made a decision that seemed to 'violate the ancestral teachings'.
Under the leadership of legendary investor David Swensen, in October 2018, Yale University, along with Harvard, Stanford, and other top universities, invested in the newly established Paradigm's first $450 million crypto fund, which was founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang. At the same time, Yale also participated in the first crypto fund established by a16z totaling $400 million.
Looking back, this investment during the low point not only impacted the development trajectories of Paradigm and a16z but also accelerated the historical process of the crypto industry to some extent.
According to the original plan, Paradigm would allocate 60% of its funds to crypto assets and 40% to equity in crypto startups. However, after securing funding, Paradigm took a bold step—investing heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum through the trading platform Tagomi, with Bitcoin's entry cost around $4,000. Just a few months later, in the first half of 2019, Bitcoin's price briefly exceeded $10,000.
For university endowments, at that time it was impossible to directly purchase Bitcoin, and there were no compliant ETF products. Having Paradigm hold crypto assets on their behalf was a kind of 'curve entry' strategy. Even if losses occurred, the foundation could still achieve risk isolation in terms of compliance and responsibility.
How exactly Matt Huang persuaded the Yale fund to invest in a newly established crypto fund remains a mystery.
Although Matt Huang's mother, Marina Chen, was a professor in the computer science department at Yale University, there is no information to prove that Marina Chen influenced Yale's investment in Paradigm.
Through an article published by Matt Huang in 2020 (preaching Bitcoin to open-minded skeptics), we may glimpse how Matt Huang persuaded the investment heads of various university funds back then.
In Matt Huang's view, bubbles are not defects but a necessary path for Bitcoin to gain wider acceptance. Each bubble has expanded Bitcoin's awareness and acceptance. Bitcoin will not challenge the dollar's status as a medium of exchange in the short term, but in the future, it will run alongside gold as a hedging tool in investment portfolios, held by institutional investors, until central banks may eventually consider Bitcoin as a reserve.
For the crypto industry, Paradigm is not just an investment institution bringing capital but also an important builder.
In April 2019, Paradigm led a $1 million investment in Uniswap as a seed round investor. At that time, Uniswap hadn't even formed a company, and the developer was just the founder Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer who had recently been laid off by Siemens and had only started self-learning Solidity in 2017.
Not just investing, Dan Robinson of the Paradigm research team is almost daily immersed in Uniswap Discord, helping to solve liquidity and smart contract issues.
Through the cooperation of both parties, the AMM model was born, igniting the DeFi summer.
Paradigm has invested in numerous star projects, including StarkWare, Mina, Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, Yield, Optimism, Amber, Fireblocks, Synthetix, Opyn, TaxBit, BlockFi, Chainalysis, Gitcoin, Lido, dYdX, and many more.
Another crypto fund in which Yale made an early investment, a16z crypto, also shaped the industry's development, investing in well-known projects such as Coinbase, Solana, Aptos, Avalanche, and Arweave. In addition to investing, a16z has also participated deeply in industry development through public policy influence, having donated tens of millions of dollars to the super PAC Fairshake that supports crypto issues and betting on Trump's victory to obtain a more favorable crypto policy environment.
Back to the end of 2018, the beginning of all this cannot be separated from the legendary investor David Swensen.
As the highest-paid person at Yale, he has managed billions of dollars in endowment funds for the past 34 years, increasing the fund size from $1 billion to $31.2 billion, achieving an average annual return rate of nearly 17%.
The 'Yale model' he pioneered has become the gold standard for university endowments worldwide. Today, many heads of endowment funds at top institutions like Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania are his former employees, referred to as the 'Yale faction'.
Yale's entry quickly triggered a chain reaction. Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Stanford, and MIT followed suit around the same time. (The Information) reported at the end of 2018 that Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, MIT, and the University of North Carolina all invested in at least one cryptocurrency fund through their respective endowment funds.
In a sense, Yale's investment in 2018 was not only a timely aid during the industry's winter but also a high-profile vote of confidence in the future of the crypto industry.
The crypto gang in prestigious schools
Beyond capital and endorsement, the more profound impact of the world's top universities on the crypto industry lies in people.
Wherever there are people, there is a community, and many of the 'leaders' and core forces in the crypto community mostly come from prestigious schools, gradually forming a powerful yet invisible 'university gang'.
In the Chinese-speaking world, the Tsinghua system is undoubtedly the most influential. The former founder of Huobi, Li Lin, graduated from Tsinghua University’s Automation Department; the core team of the high-performance Layer 1 blockchain Conflux comes from Tsinghua’s Yao Class; the two co-founders of the blockchain security company CertiK, Gu Ronghui (CEO) and Shao Zhong (CTO), also graduated from Tsinghua.
Tron founder Justin Sun and Bitmain founder Wu Jihan both graduated from Peking University.
The alumni projects of Zhejiang University are spread across Web3 applications, from the NFT trading platform Magic Eden to the NFT data platform NFTGo, from the popular chain game Stepn to the hardware wallet Keystone, nearly covering multiple tracks of C-end applications.
Abroad, a prestigious school background is more of a standard for founders in the crypto industry.
The Stanford gang has a huge influence in the crypto industry due to its heart position in Silicon Valley, nurturing founders of star projects such as OpenSea, Alchemy, Filecoin, Story, and known industry leaders such as Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation.
The 2019 Stanford University blockchain conference gathered a star-studded lineup of sponsors, including well-known projects and institutions like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polychain, rivaling many large crypto conferences.
The MIT gang excels in technology research. The MIT Digital Currency Initiative team participated in the development of Zcash, which was selected as one of the world's top breakthrough technologies by MIT in 2018. After all, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), a milestone technology in cryptography, were proposed by MIT researchers in the 1980s.
MIT professor and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali even personally got involved, founding the high-performance public chain Algorand in 2018.
The MIT alumni lineup can be described as a 'crypto star roster': Paradigm founder Matt Huang, MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor, StarkWare co-founder Uri Kolodny, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, and FTX founder SBF all hail from MIT.
UCB (University of California, Berkeley) is extremely active in entrepreneurship and incubation.
In January 2019, Berkeley established the blockchain startup accelerator Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, operated jointly by Berkeley Haas School of Business, Berkeley Engineering SCET, and Berkeley Blockchain, which incubates a batch of early crypto projects each year and has accelerated over a hundred companies to date. Computer science professor Song Xiaodong even personally got involved in founding the privacy public chain Oasis Network. Other well-known UCB projects include Galxe, Osmosis, Sei Network, Opyn, Ampleforth, Kadena, and more.
The Princeton gang has had a far-reaching impact in the investment field.
In 2022, four alumni from the class of 1987, including Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, Pantera Capital founder Daniel Morehead, Galaxy Digital founder Michael Novogratz, and Fortress Investment Group's Peter Briger, jointly donated $20 million to their alma mater to launch a blockchain research program.
It is worth mentioning that Morehead received early support from Briger and Novogratz when he founded Pantera. Today, Pantera has become a top crypto fund managing over $5 billion in assets.
In an industry that emphasizes 'Don’t Trust, Verify', trust between individuals is particularly precious. Alumni relationships are a natural trust bond: founders are more inclined to hire alumni, and investors are more willing to invest in alumni, forming an invisible barrier of 'gang culture'.
After Li Lin founded Huobi, he brought in classmates Lan Jianzhong and Zhu Jiawei. More than half of the executives come from Tsinghua University, including former CEO Seven and CFO Zhang Li, who also graduated from Tsinghua. Wu Jihan similarly relied on his Peking University classmates for assistance at Bitmain.
Today, blockchain courses have become standard at major universities, and student blockchain clubs and alumni networks interweave into an invisible web of talent and capital.
The Stanford CBR conference, Berkeley's Xcelerator, and MIT's DCI hackathon are continuously injecting new blood into the crypto world.
Not only are they 'early investors' in the industry, but universities have also become 'martial arts sects' in the crypto world.
