November 17, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update. We hope you had a great weekend even though Bitcoin didn't. Let's dive in.

People want Harvard wants exposure to on-chain assets in off-chain ways

The extremely wise, informed readers of the Meridian Update understand a key theme of 2025 has been people wanting, and getting, exposure to on-chain assets in off-chain ways. We talked about exchange-traded products (ETPs) a couple times last week alone.

Today, we get to tell you that Harvard wants exposure to on-chain assets in off-chain ways:

“FACT: Harvard owns over $400m of BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF (IBIT).”

The Harvard University endowment is the largest academic endowment in the world. Its most recent SEC filing made public that it now holds over 6.8 million shares, up from just over 1.9 million in its filing a quarter ago, of the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF. That’s the BlackRock Bitcoin ETP. Longtime Meridian Update readers may remember BlackRock from our coverage of Larry Fink discussing the tokenization of all assets. So Harvard has $400 million of Bitcoin, but not on-chain. They let BlackRock handle that.

Isn’t that fun? It’s especially fun because a Harvard economist said this about Bitcoin in 2018:

"The likelihood of bitcoin prices falling to $100 is greater than that of the digital currency trading at $100,000 a decade from now”

Well, well, well, Mr. Harvard Economist. You have 3 years to tank the price of Bitcoin and sound right.

So what can we take away from a large university endowment taking a large position in an on-chain asset? It’s hard to say. Keep in mind that Harvard’s endowment was buying almond farms in Australia. Maybe it was a good investment? Also keep in mind that Harvard’s endowment has had a lower average return than the S&P 500 over the past 8 years. By a few percentage points. It also underperformed its peers.

We do have a series of related questions. Did Harvard’s endowment managers think, even for a second, about spinning up blockchain wallets to buy all this Bitcoin? Did they consider Bitcoin wrapped onto Solana? Are they about to buy some of the SOL and XRP ETPs?

BTC took the weekend off

As in it was off $100k throughout the weekend. As in it was under $100k throughout the weekend. Was it because Harvard’s endowment bought Bitcoin? We joke, we joke. Probably.

Anyway, Crypto Twitter noticed. This data point was especially interesting:

“Bitcoin has fallen another 3%, now erasing all year to date gains.”

If you have read the Meridian Update for even a few weeks, you probably have the sense that 2025 has been a good year for the on-chain world from an adoption, product, and regulatory perspective. And that sense would be correct. It goes something like this:

“Crypto sentiment? Multi-year lows.

All while stablecoins and institutional pipelines hit ATHs.”

Can we explain this? Absolutely not, no chance, how could we. We also wouldn’t take the approach of one of the US president’s children. We’d just say That’s weird. Something to keep an eye on.

Not to brag about our friends…

..but people were talking about the investing interface our friends at Meridian Research built. They were most excited about its ability to schedule trades by chat. Specifically, Crypto Twitter picked up a Meridian Update writer’s tweet about dollar-cost averaging into a token that tracks SOL, the native token of Solana, while providing staking yield.

But we aren’t just here to brag about friends. We are here to say there was notable product buzz on Crypto Twitter Friday and over the weekend.

The first was about the Meridian Research app, as we discussed. That had steam on Saturday and Sunday.

The second was Jupiter, the decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator we’ve talked about before on the Meridian Update, announcing it had made additional prediction markets available on the Solana network. This announcement was technically in the wee hours of Friday morning, but caught attention throughout Friday. We haven’t talked too much about prediction markets on-chain. But this was a good reminder that we need to. So we promise we will. Soon.

The third was some buzz about Zashi. Zashi is a wallet interface for Zcash. It is built by Electric Coin Co., the creators of the Zcash protocol. It has a new swap feature coming down the pipeline. We’ve not talked about Zashi before, but we have talked about Zcash. Here’s a refresher on Zcash:

“Zcash is a blockchain network that allows users to do private transactions. And its price surged yesterday. So every transaction that happens on blockchain networks won’t be visible, exactly, at least not if Zcash has anything to do with it. Worth keeping an eye on this…but how, the privacy!”

Privacy and the on-chain world is an extremely interesting topic that we also promise to come back to. It has been a steady buzz on Crypto Twitter, but usually without on specific catalyst event to get us to write about it, aside from some news about the Zcash token. But it is something to keep an eye on.

That’s a wrap

Harvard bought more Bitcoin, Bitcoin stayed below $100k, and some on-chain products caught Crypto Twitter’s attention. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.

Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.