Preparation for the Bear Market: The Hidden Influencer is Actually an Ivy League Graduate

(This article is reprinted from TechFlow Shenchao, original authors Yanz, Liam)

Universities Become the “Martial Arts Sects” of the Crypto World

In August 2025, the price of Bitcoin surpassed $120,000, and the once “marginal asset” was once again thrust onto the mainstream stage. This driving force comes not only from Wall Street’s hedge funds but also from the most conservative and astute fund managers within Ivy League campuses.

On August 9, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed a detail that caught the market’s attention in its 13F filings: Harvard University’s
Endowment Fund (approximately $53.2 billion) held $116 million in Bitcoin ETFs (IBIT) as of the second quarter of 2025. This position ranked as its fifth-largest investment, following Microsoft, Amazon, Booking Holdings, and Meta, even surpassing the holdings in Google’s parent company Alphabet and Nvidia.

Harvard is not alone. Brown University, Emory University, and the University of Austin have all publicly disclosed their cryptocurrency positions.

The “miser” in these ivory towers embracing cryptocurrency is not a sudden impulse but rather the surface emergence of years of planning. The capital, talent, and technology from prestigious schools have already taken deep root in the crypto industry. This time, however, they have been pushed to the forefront.

Investing in Crypto Amidst the Bubble Burst

2018 marked the darkest hour for the cryptocurrency industry. With the ICO bubble bursting, the global market capitalization of crypto assets evaporated by over $630 billion, falling below $200 billion. Bitcoin dropped to $3,000, Ethereum to $80, and retail investors fled the scene, leading to cryptocurrency being labeled a “Ponzi scheme,” with even Facebook announcing a ban on crypto-related ads.

During this time when everyone was shunning crypto, Yale University’s endowment fund made a decision that seemed to contradict its founding principles. Under the legendary investor David Swensen’s leadership, in October 2018, Yale joined Harvard, Stanford, and other top institutions to invest in Paradigm’s newly established $450 million crypto fund, co-founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang. Simultaneously, Yale also participated in a16z’s inaugural $400 million crypto fund.

Looking back, this investment during the industry’s low point not only influenced the developmental trajectory of Paradigm and a16z but also accelerated the historical process of the crypto industry to some extent.

According to the original plan, Paradigm would allocate 60% of its capital to crypto assets and 40% to equity in crypto startups. However, after securing funding, Paradigm chose a bold move — through its trading platform Tagomi, it aggressively bottomed out Bitcoin and Ethereum, accumulating Bitcoin at an approximate cost of $4,000. Within just a few months, Bitcoin’s price surged past $10,000 in the first half of 2019.

For university endowment funds, at that time, there was no way to directly purchase Bitcoin, nor were there compliant ETF products. Allowing Paradigm to hold crypto assets on their behalf was a form of “indirect entry” strategy; even if losses occurred, the foundation could achieve risk isolation in terms of compliance and responsibility.

How Matt Huang managed to convince the Yale fund to invest in a newly established crypto fund remains somewhat of a mystery. Although Matt Huang’s mother, Marina Chen, was a professor in Yale’s Computer Science Department, there is no evidence to suggest that she influenced Yale’s investment in Paradigm.

Through an article published by Matt Huang in 2020 titled “Preaching Bitcoin to Open-Minded Skeptics,” we might glimpse how he persuaded the investment officers of various university funds. In Matt Huang’s view, bubbles are not flaws but necessary paths for Bitcoin to gain wider acceptance; each bubble expands Bitcoin’s recognition and acceptance. Bitcoin will not challenge the dollar’s status as a medium of exchange in the short term, but in the future, it will stand alongside gold as a hedge in investment portfolios, held by institutional investors, until central banks may eventually consider Bitcoin as a reserve.

For the crypto industry, Paradigm is not just a capital-providing investment institution but also an important builder. In April 2019, Paradigm led a seed round investment of $1 million in Uniswap. At that time, Uniswap had not even established a company; the developer was just its founder, Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer who had recently been laid off from Siemens and began self-learning the Solidity language in 2017.

Not only did they invest, but Paradigm’s research team member Dan Robinson also immersed himself in Uniswap’s Discord almost daily, helping resolve liquidity and smart contract issues. Through their collaboration, the AMM model was born, igniting the DeFi summer.

Paradigm has invested in numerous star projects, including StarkWare, Mina, Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, Yield, and Optimism, Amber, Fireblocks, Synthetix, Opyn, TaxBit, BlockFi, Chainalysis, Gitcoin, Lido, dYdX, and more.

Another crypto fund Yale invested in early on, a16z crypto, similarly shaped the industry’s development, investing in well-known projects such as Coinbase, Solana, Aptos, Avalanche, Arweave, and more. Beyond investing, a16z has deeply engaged in industry development through its public policy influence, having donated tens of millions to the super PAC Fairshake, which supports crypto issues, and betting on Trump’s victory to secure a more favorable crypto policy environment.

The Ripple Effect of Yale’s Entry

Back in late 2018, everything began with the legendary investor David Swensen. As the highest-paid person at Yale, he has managed billions of dollars in endowment funds for the past 34 years, expanding the fund size from $1 billion to $31.2 billion, achieving an average annual return of nearly 17%.

The “Yale Model” he pioneered has become the gold standard for university endowments worldwide. Today, many of the endowment fund managers at top institutions like Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Penn are former employees of his, referred to as the “Yale School.”

Yale’s entry quickly triggered a chain reaction. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and other Ivy League schools followed suit around the same time. The Information reported at the end of 2018 that Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, MIT, and the University of North Carolina all invested through their respective endowment funds in at least one cryptocurrency fund.

In a sense, Yale’s investment in 2018 was not only a timely aid during the industry’s winter but also a high-profile vote of confidence in the crypto industry’s future.

The Crypto Gang in Prestigious Schools

Beyond capital and endorsement, the more profound influence of the world’s top universities on the crypto industry lies in people. Where there are people, there is a world; many of the “leaders” and core forces in the crypto world largely come from various prestigious institutions, gradually forming a powerful and invisible “university gang.”

In the Chinese-speaking world, Tsinghua University undoubtedly stands out as the most influential. Li Lin, the former founder of Huobi, graduated from Tsinghua University’s Automation Department. The core team of the high-performance Layer1 blockchain Conflux comes from Tsinghua’s Yao Class; the founder of the blockchain security company CertiK, Gu Ronghui (CEO), also graduated from Tsinghua University.

Tron’s founder Justin Sun and Bitmain’s founder Jihan Wu both graduated from Peking University. The alumni projects from Zhejiang University are spread across Web3 application endpoints, from NFT trading platform Magic Eden to NFT data platform NFTGo, from the popular blockchain game Stepn to hardware wallet Keystone, covering multiple tracks of consumer-facing applications.

Overseas, a prestigious school background has become standard for crypto industry founders. The Stanford gang, relying on its central position in Silicon Valley, has a massive influence in the crypto industry, cultivating founders of star projects such as OpenSea, Alchemy, Filecoin, and Story, as well as renowned industry leaders like Lily Liu from the Solana Foundation.

At the 2019 Stanford Blockchain Conference, sponsors were star-studded, with well-known projects and institutions like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polychain prominently featured, rivaling many large crypto conferences.

The MIT gang excels in technical research. MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative team participated in the development of Zcash, which was selected by MIT as one of the world’s top 10 groundbreaking technologies in 2018; after all, the breakthrough technology of zero-knowledge proof (ZK) was proposed by MIT researchers in the 1980s.

MIT professor and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali even personally founded the high-performance public chain Algorand in 2017. The lineup of MIT alumni can be described as a “crypto star roster”: Paradigm founder Matt Huang, MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor, StarkWare co-founder Uri Kolodny, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, and FTX founder SBF all hail from MIT.

UCB (University of California, Berkeley) is extremely active in entrepreneurship and incubation. In January 2019, Berkeley established the blockchain startup accelerator Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, jointly operated by Berkeley Haas School of Business, Berkeley Engineering SCET, and Berkeley Blockchain, which annually nurtures a batch of early-stage crypto projects and has accelerated over a hundred enterprises to date. Computer Science Professor Song Xiaodong even personally founded the privacy public chain Oasis Network. Other well-known UCB projects include Galxe, Osmosis, Sei Network, Opyn, Ampleforth, and Kadena.

The Princeton gang has a deep impact on the investment field. In 2022, four alumni from the class of 1987, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, Pantera Capital founder Daniel Morehead, Galaxy Digital founder Michael Novogratz, and Fortress Investment Group’s Peter Briger, jointly donated $20 million to their alma mater to initiate a blockchain research project.

Notably, when Morehead founded Pantera, he received early support from Briger and Novogratz. Today, Pantera has become a top crypto fund managing over $5 billion in assets.

In an industry that emphasizes “Don’t Trust, Verify,” trust between individuals becomes increasingly valuable. Alumni relationships serve as this natural bond of trust: founders are more inclined to hire alumni, and investors are more willing to invest in alumni, forming an invisible barrier of “gang culture.”

After Li Lin founded Huobi, he brought in classmates Lan Jianzhong and Zhu Jiawei, with over half of the senior management being Tsinghua alumni. Former CEO Qiye and CFO Zhang Li also graduated from Tsinghua. Jihan Wu similarly relied heavily on Peking University classmates at Bitmain.

Today, blockchain courses have become standard at major universities, and student blockchain clubs intertwined with alumni networks form an invisible web of talent and capital. Events like Stanford’s CBR Conference, Berkeley’s Xcelerator, and MIT’s DCI Hackathon continuously inject new blood into the crypto world.

Not just “early investors” in the industry, universities have become the “martial arts sects” of the crypto world.

Risk Warning

Investing in cryptocurrencies carries high risks, with prices potentially fluctuating dramatically. You may lose your entire principal. Please evaluate risks carefully.