Harvard and Yale Enter the Game: The New Battlefield of Encryption at Top Universities

Source: Deep Tide TechFlow

Written by: Yanz, Liam

Original Title: When Harvard and Yale Enter the Scene, the Crypto Landscape in Top Universities

In August 2025, the price of Bitcoin crossed $120,000, and the once “fringe asset” was pushed back onto the mainstream stage. This driving force came not only from Wall Street hedge funds but also from the most conservative and astute fund managers in Ivy League campuses.

On August 9, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed a striking detail in its 13F filing: Harvard University’s endowment fund (approximately $53.2 billion in size) held $116 million worth of Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) in the second quarter of 2025. This position ranks as its fifth-largest investment, trailing only Microsoft, Amazon, Booking Holdings, and Meta, and even surpassing the position share of Google’s parent company Alphabet 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 “miser” in these ivory towers embracing cryptocurrency is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but rather the surface manifestation of years of planning.

The capital, talent, and technology of prestigious schools have long taken root deep within the cryptocurrency industry.

This time, they have been pushed to the front stage.

Invest in cryptocurrency amidst the burst of the bubble

2018 was the darkest moment for the cryptocurrency industry.

With the burst of the ICO bubble, the global cryptocurrency market value evaporated by over $630 billion, falling to less than $200 billion. Bitcoin dropped to $3,000, Ethereum fell to $80, and retail investors rushed to exit. Cryptocurrencies were labeled as “Ponzi schemes,” and even Facebook announced a ban on cryptocurrency-related advertisements.

At this moment when everyone is avoiding it, Yale University’s endowment fund made a decision that seems to “contradict ancestral teachings.”

Under the leadership of legendary investor David Swensen, in October 2018, Yale University joined top institutions like Harvard and Stanford to invest in Paradigm’s first $450 million cryptocurrency 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 cryptocurrency fund established by a16z, which has a total of $400 million.

Looking back, this investment made during the downturn not only affected the development trajectories of Paradigm and a16z, but also, to some extent, accelerated the historical progress of the cryptocurrency industry.

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 the funding, Paradigm took a bold step—investing heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum through the trading platform Tagomi, with an entry cost for Bitcoin of around $4,000. Just a few months later, in the first half of 2019, the price of Bitcoin briefly surpassed $10,000.

For university endowment funds, 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 “curved entry” strategy, allowing the foundation to achieve risk isolation in terms of compliance and responsibility even in the event of losses.

How Matt Huang convinced Yale’s endowment to invest in a newly established crypto fund for cryptocurrency seems to have always been 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 had any influence on Yale University’s investment in Paradigm.

Through an article published by Matt Huang in 2020 titled “Preaching Bitcoin to the Enlightened Skeptics,” we might get a glimpse of how Matt Huang convinced the investment heads of various university endowments at that time.

In Matt Huang’s view, bubbles are not flaws but a necessary path for Bitcoin to gain wider acceptance. Each bubble has expanded Bitcoin’s awareness and acceptance. In the short term, Bitcoin will not challenge the dollar’s status as a medium of exchange; in the future, it will run alongside gold as a hedging tool in investment portfolios, held by institutional investors, until finally, central banks may consider Bitcoin as a reserve.

For the crypto industry, Paradigm is not just an investment institution that brings capital, but also an important builder.

In April 2019, Paradigm invested 1 million dollars in Uniswap as a seed round lead investor. At that time, Uniswap had not even established a company, and the only developer was founder Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer who had just been laid off by Siemens and had only started self-learning Solidity in 2017.

Not just investing, Dan Robinson from the Paradigm research team spends almost every day in the Uniswap Discord, helping to solve liquidity and smart contract issues.

With the collaboration of both parties, the AMM model was born, igniting the DeFi summer.

Paradigm’s investment portfolio is filled with star projects, including StarkWare, Mina, Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, Yield, Optimism, Amber, Fireblocks, Synthetix, Opyn, TaxBit, BlockFi, Chainalysis, Gitcoin, Lido, dYdX, and many more.

Another cryptocurrency fund that Yale University invested in early on, a16z crypto has also shaped the development of the industry, investing in well-known projects like Coinase, Solana, Aptos, Avalanche, Arweave, and others. In addition to investing, a16z has deeply participated in industry development through its influence on public policy, having donated tens of millions of dollars to the super PAC Fairshake that supports cryptocurrency issues, and betting on Trump’s victory to secure a more favorable cryptocurrency policy environment.

Back in late 2018, the beginning of all this is inseparable from the legendary investor David Swensen.

As the highest-paid person at Yale, he has managed billions of dollars in endowment funds over the past 34 years, expanding the fund’s size from $1 billion to $31.2 billion, achieving an average annual return of nearly 17%.

The “Yale Model” he pioneered has become the gold standard for university endowment funds worldwide. Today, many of the heads of endowment funds at top universities such as Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania are former employees of his, and they are referred to as the “Yale School.”

Yale’s entry quickly triggered a chain reaction. Ivy League schools like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT also followed suit around the same time. The Information reported at the end of 2018 that Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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 assistance during the industry’s cold winter, but also a high-profile vote of confidence in the future of the cryptocurrency industry.

The Crypto Gang in Prestigious Schools

Beyond capital and endorsements, the deeper impact of top universities on the cryptocurrency industry lies in the people.

Where there are people, there is a world of rivers and lakes, and many of the “gang leaders” and core forces in the crypto realm mostly come from prestigious universities, gradually forming an invisible yet powerful “university gang.”

In the Chinese-speaking world, Tsinghua University is undoubtedly the most influential presence. The original founder of Huobi, Li Lin, graduated from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University; the core team of the high-performance Layer 1 blockchain Conflux comes from the Yao Class at Tsinghua; the two co-founders of the blockchain security company CertiK, Gu Ronghui (CEO) and Shao Zhong (CTO), are also graduates of Tsinghua.

Tron founder Justin Sun and Bitmain founder Jihan Wu both graduated from Peking University.

The alumni program of Zhejiang University spans 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, covering multiple tracks of C-end applications.

Abroad, having a prestigious school background is a standard requirement for founders in the cryptocurrency industry.

Stanford, leveraging its position at the heart of Silicon Valley, has a huge influence in the crypto industry, nurturing founders of star projects such as OpenSea, Alchemy, Filecoin, Story, and well-known industry leaders like Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation.

At the 2019 Stanford University Blockchain Conference, a star-studded lineup of sponsors included well-known projects and institutions such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polychain, poised to surpass many large cryptocurrency conferences.

MIT is known for its strengths in technological research. The Digital Currency Initiative team at MIT participated in the development of Zcash, which was selected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the top ten breakthrough technologies in the world in 2018. After all, the milestone cryptographic technology of zero-knowledge proof (ZK) was proposed by MIT researchers in the 1980s.

MIT professor and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali personally got involved and founded the high-performance public blockchain Algorand in 2018.

The MIT alumni lineup can be described as a “crypto star roster”: Matt Huang, founder of Paradigm; Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy; Uri Kolodny, co-founder of StarkWare; Litecoin founder Charlie Lee; and SBF, founder of FTX, all hail from MIT.

UCB (University of California, Berkeley) is very active in entrepreneurship and incubation.

In January 2019, the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator was established as a blockchain startup accelerator, jointly operated by the Berkeley Haas School of Business, Berkeley Engineering SCET, and the Berkeley Blockchain. It incubates a number of early-stage crypto projects each year and has accelerated over a hundred companies to date. Professor Song Xiaodong from the Computer Science department personally participated in founding the privacy public chain Oasis Network. Other notable UCB projects include Galxe, Osmosis, Sei Network, Opyn, Ampleforth, and Kadena.

The Princeton gang has a profound influence in the investment field. In 2022, four alumni from the class of 1987, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, Pantera Capital founder Daniel Morehead, Galaxy Digital founder Michael Novogratz, and Peter Briger of Fortress Investment Group, jointly donated $20 million to their alma mater to launch a blockchain research program.

It is worth mentioning that when Morehead founded Pantera, he received early support from Briger and Novogratz. Today, Pantera is a leading crypto fund managing over $5 billion in assets.

In an industry that emphasizes “Don’t Trust, Verify”, trust between people is particularly precious. Alumni relationships serve as this natural bond of trust: founders are more inclined to hire alumni, and investors are also more willing to invest in alumni, thus forming an invisible barrier of “gang culture”.

After Li Lin founded Huobi, he invited his classmate Lan Jianzhong to serve as vice president, with more than half of the senior management coming from Tsinghua University. The former CEO, Seven, and CFO Zhang Li also graduated from Tsinghua. Wu Jihan at Bitmain similarly relied heavily on classmates from Peking University for assistance.

Nowadays, blockchain courses have become standard in major universities, and student blockchain clubs intertwine with alumni networks to form an invisible web of talent and capital.

Stanford CBR Conference, Berkeley’s Xcelerator, and MIT’s DCI Hackathon are continuously injecting new blood into the crypto world.

Not just the “early investors” of the industry, universities have become the “martial arts sects” of the crypto world.