In the administrative offices of Dartmouth College, buried within a stack of mandatory government paperwork known as a 13F filing, a surprising line item appeared recently. It wasn’t a donation record or a tuition adjustment. It was a receipt for a purchase made while financial markets were bleeding red ink. This document confirms that one of the Ivy League’s most prestigious endowments spent millions buying into Bitcoin right when the rest of the world was seemingly running for the exits. It raises a question that doesn’t have a simple answer: did the smartest money in the room see a bargain, or are they playing a game the rest of us can’t quite see?
- Bitcoin fell from $126,000 to under $90,000 in late 2025.
- Institutional holdings increased by nearly 900,000 shares.
- BlackRock’s IBIT fund pulled in $25 billion despite losing money.
To understand what happened, we have to look at the last few months of 2025. It was a messy time for crypto. Bitcoin had climbed to a dizzying height of $126,000 in October, only to trip and tumble down to under $90,000 by the end of the year. In normal circumstances, when an asset loses nearly a quarter of its value in three months, investors panic. They sell. They cut their losses.
But the filings show the opposite happened. While prices were falling, the big players—investment banks, hedge funds, and endowments like Dartmouth—were quietly buying more.
The supermarket sale logic
Imagine walking into your local supermarket and seeing that your favorite brand of coffee, which usually costs $20, is suddenly marked down to $15. If you drink coffee every day, you don’t panic and think the coffee is broken. You buy two bags instead of one. You stock up.
This appears to be the logic used by 121 different institutional managers in the fourth quarter of 2025. According to data analyzed by Bitcoin expert Sani, these firms increased their collective holdings by nearly 900,000 shares. They saw the price drop not as a warning sign, but as a discount sticker.
However, the math creates a strange paradox. Because the price of Bitcoin dropped so sharply, the total dollar value of what these companies own actually went down, even though they own more shares. It is like buying that second bag of coffee, but then finding out the market value of coffee beans crashed so hard that your two bags are now worth less than your single bag was last week. Specifically, their pile of shares grew by 17%, but the value of that pile shrank by about $19 million.
The BlackRock mystery
The strangest part of this story centers on BlackRock. If you aren’t familiar with them, think of BlackRock as the world’s largest financial supermarket. They sell everything. Their Bitcoin product, known as IBIT, is an ETF. An ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) works like a basket. Instead of you going out and trying to buy digital coins yourself—which involves digital wallets, private keys, and a fair bit of anxiety—you just buy a share of BlackRock’s basket. They handle the messy technical parts, and you get a receipt that says you own a slice of the Bitcoin inside.
In 2025, BlackRock’s Bitcoin basket did something almost unheard of. The fund lost money for its investors—about 10%—yet people kept throwing cash at it. It pulled in over $25 billion in new money. For context, gold went up nearly 65% last year, yet investors were still pouring money into the losing Bitcoin fund.
Matt Hougan, a chief investment officer at Bitwise, noted that 99% of financial advisors who already dabbled in crypto plan to keep buying or buy more. They aren’t scared of the volatility; they seem to expect it.
Are they believers or gamblers?
Here is where things get a little tricky. It is easy to look at these purchases and think, “Wow, Wall Street really loves Bitcoin.” And for some, like Dartmouth, that might be true. They might be buying “portfolio sleeves”—a fancy term for tucking some Bitcoin away in a drawer for ten years, hoping it appreciates like a fine wine.
But for others, specifically the hedge funds, this might not be a vote of confidence at all. It might be a trick called “basis trading.”
To explain this, we need a sports betting analogy. Imagine you could bet on a football team to win at one casino, and simultaneously bet on them to lose at another casino, but the odds were slightly different at each place. If you did the math right, you could guarantee a profit regardless of whether the team actually won or lost. You aren’t betting on the team; you are betting on the difference between the casinos.
In the financial world, hedge funds often buy the Bitcoin ETF (betting it goes up) and simultaneously sell Bitcoin futures contracts (betting it goes down). They don’t care if Bitcoin goes to $1 million or $0. They are just capturing the tiny price difference between the ETF price and the futures price.
This is why the government filings can be misleading. The form—the 13F—only requires companies to list what they bought (the ETF). It does not require them to list what they bet against (the futures). So, on paper, it looks like they are huge Bitcoin fans. In reality, they might just be exploiting a math loophole to make a safe profit.
Why the difference matters to you
Why should you care if they are “believers” or “traders”? Because it tells us what might happen next.
If this money is coming from believers (like endowments and pension funds), it is “sticky.” It will stay there for years, providing a solid floor for the price. It’s like pouring concrete into the foundation of a house.
If the money is coming from traders playing the arbitrage game, it is “mercenary.” It is only there as long as the math works out. If the gap between the ETF and the futures market closes, or if the trade stops being profitable, that money could vanish overnight. It’s not concrete; it’s just scaffolding.
For now, the only thing we know for sure is that ownership is shifting. Regular people might have sold during the panic, but the institutions stepped in to scoop up the shares. Whether they are holding them for the long haul or just renting them for a quick trade remains the billion-dollar question.
