Harvard Sells Entire $87 Million Ethereum ETF Stake After One Quarter

Harvard Management Company, which oversees Harvard University’s endowment, sold its entire stake in a spot Ether exchange-traded fund after holding it for just one quarter. The move comes as Ether remains under pressure and turmoil within the Ethereum Foundation weighs on sentiment.

Cointelegraph reported on May 22 that HMC said in its first-quarter 2026 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it had fully exited its position in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), a stake worth about $87 million.

HMC had added the ETF in the fourth quarter of 2025 and closed out the position about a quarter later. By contrast, it only trimmed its spot Bitcoin ETF holdings. HMC sold about 2.3 million shares of Bitcoin ETFs during the first quarter, but it still holds more than 3 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), worth about $117 million at current prices.

Markets have been focused on Ether’s recent weakness and staff departures at the Ethereum Foundation. ETH is down more than 50% from its record high of about $5,000 reached in August last year.

Departures of key Ethereum Foundation personnel have continued this year. Researchers Julian Ma and Carl Beek recently left the foundation, bringing the number of publicly disclosed departures this year to eight. Josh Stark, a longtime researcher and project manager, also left the foundation in April.

The Ethereum Foundation released an operations document in March outlining its core values, including decentralization, privacy, open source and censorship resistance. The market response was mixed.

Crypto journalist Laura Shin said those values are important principles that should be preserved. But she added that the foundation needs to respond more actively on tokenomics and ETH’s price competitiveness. While rival projects are moving aggressively to gain market share, the Ethereum Foundation appears to be taking an overly passive approach, she said.