Dartmouth Endowment Crypto Holdings Drop $2M
SkimNews Take
The price-linked decline shows the endowment’s crypto exposure is inherently volatile, with reported holdings reflecting market swings rather than necessarily active changes in position size.
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- Dartmouth College's $9 billion endowment reported crypto ETF holdings of about $12.4M as of June 30, down from $14.6M on March 31 — a roughly $2.2M decline with share counts unchanged across all three funds.
- The value drop mirrored falling crypto prices since March 31: Bitcoin fell 7.7% to $62,915, Solana dropped 9.6% to $75.11, and Ether declined 10.8% to $1,875.
- Dartmouth held positions across three ETFs: the Bitwise Solana staking ETF, the Grayscale Ethereum staking ETF, and BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF.
- Dartmouth first added crypto exposure to its endowment in 2025, making it one of the first US universities to invest in digital assets.
- Harvard, with a $57 billion endowment, had fully liquidated its $87 million iShares Ethereum position as of March 31, though it had not disclosed its second-quarter holdings as of Friday.
Why it matters: The decline is purely price-driven — Dartmouth held the same number of shares across all three ETFs, meaning the $2.2M loss reflects market depreciation rather than reduced conviction. For institutional investors holding crypto ETFs, the filing illustrates passive valuation risk: even an unchanged position can lose double-digit percentages in a quarter when underlying assets like BTC, ETH, and SOL all fall roughly 8-11%.
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