Falling digital-asset prices pulled roughly two million dollars out of Dartmouth's crypto portfolio, bringing the university endowment's combined position in three crypto funds to about twelve million dollars. The endowment, the pool of donated and invested capital a university draws on to fund its operations, had put a portion of that money into products that track the prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
The holdings are spread across the Bitwise Solana staking ETF, the Grayscale Ethereum staking ETF, and BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF. An exchange-traded fund, or ETF, trades on a stock exchange like a share of stock but holds underlying assets. That structure gives an institutional investor price exposure to an asset class without requiring it to buy, custody, or manage the underlying assets directly.
Two of the three are staking products. Staking is the process by which a blockchain network asks coin holders to lock up their coins to help validate transactions on that network. In exchange, the network pays out additional coins. In the Bitwise fund, the staked asset is Solana. In the Grayscale fund, it is Ethereum. Both funds carry two variables: the price of the underlying coin and the staking yield on top of it. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF, the third fund, holds Bitcoin.
When crypto prices fall, the market value of ETF shares tied to those assets falls with them. That is the plain-English version of what happened here. Prices in the crypto market dropped. All three funds tracked lower. The combined dollar value of Dartmouth's positions across all three came to roughly twelve million dollars, about two million below where those positions had been.