Morning Minute: Harvard Sells Bitcoin for Ethereum

Morning Minute is a every day publication written by Tyler Warner. The evaluation and opinions expressed are his personal and don’t essentially mirror these of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

At the moment’s prime information:

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

🎓 Harvard Simply Bought Bitcoin for Ethereum

The neatest cash within the room is rotating.

📌 What Occurred

In a 13F submitting with the SEC, Harvard disclosed that it trimmed 1.46M shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Belief (IBIT) throughout This autumn, bringing that place right down to roughly $265M.

On the similar time, it opened a brand-new place of three,873,044 shares in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Belief, price roughly $86.8M.

General, their mixed spot crypto ETF publicity at quarter-end topped simply over $352M.

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

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

🗣️ What They’re Saying

Sean Invoice, co-founder and CIO of Bitcoin Customary Treasury Firm, instructed Decrypt that Harvard is probably going “making a relative worth commerce with the idea that ETH is undervalued relative to BTC.”

Jennifer Ouarrag, Head of Authorized at institutional staking supplier Twinstake, described it as a “recalibration towards belongings with a number of return drivers,” noting that whereas Bitcoin stays “the first institutional store-of-value proxy,” Ethereum “presents publicity to a broader smart-contract ecosystem.”

🧠 Why It Issues

Harvard promoting Bitcoin? Not nice.

Harvard promoting Bitcoin to purchase ETH? Properly, that’s a bit extra attention-grabbing.

There may be increasingly proof that ETH is coming into the crypto dialog alongside Bitcoin because the clear #2 asset to purchase.

BlackRock talks about ETH maybe greater than Bitcoin today.

And now main establishments are monitoring the BTC / ETH ratio, taking a look at which asset has underperformed, and making portfolio selections primarily based on the evaluation.

That looks like a wager that each ETH and BTC might be round for some time, and that each may have an actual shot to search out new ATHs.

They’re very completely different belongings although, and it might have been attention-grabbing to listen to extra from Harvard on these variations.

Bitcoin is a retailer of worth play. ETH is a productive asset (see Tom Lee’s Bitmine and their weekly staking yield). Plus, it’s infrastructure, together with good contract, and privateness, and maybe even the AI integration layer.

There are many causes to be bullish on ETH and in some methods, moreso than even Bitcoin.

Harvard appears to agree…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are barely crimson down 1%; BTC -1% at $68K; ETH even at $1,970; SOL even at $85; XRP -2% at $1.45
• Steady (+12%), NEXO (+7%) and PI (+5%) led prime movers
• Logan Paul’s uncommon Pokemon card sold for a record $16.5M at public sale
• Ethereum Basis co-ED Tomasz Stańczak will step down on the finish of February, with Bastian Aue taking up alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang
• Kraken will sponsor Trump Accounts for newborns in Wyoming
• Steak ‘n’ Shake said that its Bitcoin adoption has pushed a dramatic improve in gross sales over the previous 9 months
• Vitalik Buterin argued prediction market hedging might “replace fiat currency”, proposing customized baskets of prediction market shares pegged to customers’ precise spending patterns as an alternative of dollar-pegged stablecoins
• Polymarket launched 5-minute Bitcoin up/down markets powered by Chainlink, and short-duration contracts are already driving 25% of every day buying and selling quantity
• OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger is becoming a member of OpenAI to guide its push into personal AI agents
• Binance reportedly fired no less than 5 compliance crew members who uncovered evidence that Iran-linked entities had been utilizing the platform

Company Treasuries & ETFs

• Bitcoin ETF outflows proceed to bleed, with roughly $2B in internet outflows over the previous three weeks
• Metaplanet posted a $605M full-year loss on simply $58M in income, pushed by writedowns on its 35,100 BTC now price $2.4B (common: $107K per BTC)
• Michael Saylor said Strategy can cover its debt even when Bitcoin drops to $8,000, noting 2.5 years of debt and dividend protection in a money reserve

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme majors were barely crimson; DOGE -3%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -2%, TRUMP -1%, PENGU -2%, FARTCOIN -3%
• PUNCH (+15% to $16M) led Monday movers
• Bankr launched an actual 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 purchase as much as 90M MORPHO tokens (~9% of provide) over 48 months through open-market buys and OTC offers (MORPHO +22% on the information)
• Tether invested in Dreamcash to increase USDT0-collateralized markets on Hyperliquid
• DeFiLlama launched a safe-search function (search.defillama.com) that lets customers uncover crypto initiatives completely from 5,000+ whitelisted domains

🚚 What is going on in NFTs?

• NFT leaders had been principally 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, main prime movers