Morning Minute: Harvard Sells Bitcoin for Ethereum

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors slightly red ahead of weekly open; BTC at $67k
• Harvard rotates a portion of BTC holdings into ETH
• Steak ‘n’ Shake says Bitcoin adoption dramatically increased sales
• Kraken to sponsor Trump Accounts in Wyoming
• Andre Cronje opens Flying Tulip sale to the public at $1B valuation

🎓 Harvard Just Sold Bitcoin for Ethereum

The smartest money in the room is rotating.

📌 What Happened

In a 13F filing with the SEC, Harvard disclosed that it trimmed 1.46M shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) during Q4, bringing that position down to approximately $265M.

At the same time, it opened a brand-new position of 3,873,044 shares in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust, worth roughly $86.8M.

Overall, their combined spot crypto ETF exposure at quarter-end topped just over $352M.

Harvard first disclosed a $116M IBIT position in August 2025. By November, it had tripled those holdings to roughly $350M.

Now they’ve trimmed BTC and rotated capital into ETH.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

Sean Bill, co-founder and CIO of Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, told Decrypt that Harvard is likely “making a relative value trade with the belief that ETH is undervalued relative to BTC.”

Jennifer Ouarrag, Head of Legal at institutional staking provider Twinstake, described it as a “recalibration toward assets with multiple return drivers,” noting that while Bitcoin remains “the primary institutional store-of-value proxy,” Ethereum “offers exposure to a broader smart-contract ecosystem.”

🧠 Why It Matters

Harvard selling Bitcoin? Not great.

Harvard selling Bitcoin to buy ETH? Well, that’s a bit more interesting.

There is more and more evidence that ETH is entering the crypto conversation alongside Bitcoin as the clear #2 asset to buy.

BlackRock talks about ETH perhaps more than Bitcoin these days.

And now major institutions are tracking the BTC / ETH ratio, looking at which asset has underperformed, and making portfolio decisions based on the analysis.

That seems like a bet that both ETH and BTC will be around for a while, and that both will have a real shot to find new ATHs.

They are very different assets though, and it would have been interesting to hear more from Harvard on those differences.

Bitcoin is a store of value play. ETH is a productive asset (see Tom Lee’s Bitmine and their weekly staking yield). Plus, it’s infrastructure, along with smart contract, and privacy, and perhaps even the AI integration layer.

There are plenty of reasons to be bullish on ETH and in some ways, moreso than even Bitcoin.

Harvard seems to agree…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly red down 1%; BTC -1% at $68K; ETH even at $1,970; SOL even at $85; XRP -2% at $1.45
• Stable (+12%), NEXO (+7%) and PI (+5%) led top movers
• Logan Paul’s rare Pokemon card sold for a record $16.5M at auction
• Ethereum Foundation co-ED Tomasz Stańczak will step down at the end of February, with Bastian Aue taking over alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang
• Kraken will sponsor Trump Accounts for newborns in Wyoming
• Steak ‘n’ Shake said that its Bitcoin adoption has driven a dramatic increase in sales over the past 9 months
• Vitalik Buterin argued prediction market hedging could “replace fiat currency”, proposing personalized baskets of prediction market shares pegged to users’ actual spending patterns instead of dollar-pegged stablecoins
• Polymarket launched 5-minute Bitcoin up/down markets powered by Chainlink, and short-duration contracts are already driving 25% of daily trading volume
• OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to lead its push into personal AI agents
• Binance reportedly fired at least five compliance team members who uncovered evidence that Iran-linked entities were using the platform

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• Bitcoin ETF outflows continue to bleed, with roughly $2B in net outflows over the past three weeks
• Metaplanet posted a $605M full-year loss on just $58M in revenue, driven by writedowns on its 35,100 BTC now worth $2.4B (average: $107K per BTC)
• Michael Saylor said Strategy can cover its debt even if Bitcoin drops to $8,000, noting 2.5 years of debt and dividend coverage in a cash reserve

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme majors were slightly red; DOGE -3%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -2%, TRUMP -1%, PENGU -2%, FARTCOIN -3%
• PUNCH (+15% to $16M) led Monday movers
• Bankr launched a real time token feed and new BURN token

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Andre Cronje opened up the Flying Tulip public ICO priced at $1B
• Apollo will acquire up to 90M MORPHO tokens (~9% of supply) over 48 months via open-market buys and OTC deals (MORPHO +22% on the news)
• Tether invested in Dreamcash to expand USDT0-collateralized markets on Hyperliquid
• DeFiLlama launched a safe-search feature (search.defillama.com) that lets users discover crypto projects exclusively from 5,000+ whitelisted domains

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 29.9 ETH, Pudgy +1% at 4.33 ETH, BAYC -2% at 6.16 ETH; Hypurr’s +3% at 520 HYPE
• Del Mundos soared 68% to 0.16 ETH, leading top movers