I recently came across a quite interesting discussion. A scholar mentioned in an interview that the University of Chicago cutting liberal arts funding might be related to the school leadership listening to some Nobel laureates' advice, which led them to jump into the cryptocurrency market and suffer a disastrous loss—reportedly over $6 billion.

At first glance, this number is indeed shocking. But a closer look at the facts actually exposes some face-slapping truths. The university officially responded at the end of last year, directly denying that significant losses were incurred from cryptocurrency investments, and also stated that the related investment scale was actually not large, although it had more than doubled in recent years.

A loss of $6 billion is simply not plausible. The university's endowment fund has been hovering around $10 billion over the past five years. To lose $6 billion would mean they had to put more than 60% of their fund assets into cryptocurrencies—which is contrary to any normal investment principles.

So what is the real situation? A journalist interviewed multiple sources, and the conclusion is that around 2021, the University of Chicago actually lost several tens of millions of dollars on cryptocurrency investments. This magnitude sounds much more reasonable.

Clues can be found in the school's financial reports. In the fiscal year 2022 report, as of June 2021, the book value of their cryptocurrency investments was about $64 million. A year later, this figure dropped to around $45 million. That's roughly a $19 million decrease. Subsequent financial reports no longer disclosed this item separately; the school only said they were still investing cautiously.

Interestingly, the same 2022 fiscal year report showed that the total investment loss of the entire endowment fund reached about $1.5 billion. The performance improved over the next two years, turning to profit. But we actually cannot precisely determine how much of the profit or loss came from cryptocurrencies.

This incident reflects a phenomenon: large institutions often have a lag in understanding the cryptocurrency market. During the 2021 bull run, many traditional financial institutions and university funds rushed into the market, only to be caught in the subsequent bear market. Looking back now, these investment decisions were somewhat hasty.